We don’t need a higher birth rate … we need a better quality of life for everyone.
It’s almost like if people had free time, a positive outlook on life, and resources to live comfortably that babies would be a natural outcome.
Yeah, Hans Rossling had a cool tes talk about the direct correlation between family sizes and access to healthcare. If the life expectancy goes up, family sizes go down. The talk
Now we have reached a point where the system in a lot of countries works against the forever growth as people need to work work work and don’t see a future for themselves, let alone for a family.
Hopefully not.
Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say that as long as global population is going up, we’re having too many, not too few. Once it levels off we may have to think about whether we want to degrow the population or just leave it.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if by the 2080s, “peak human” according to the quoted estimate, Brave New World baby factories are an option should we need them.
The main driver of population growth is people living longer. The problem with less babies being born means less young labourers for all the old fucks to exploit. Logan’s Run would be a better sci-fi system to adopt.
Right now it’s still birth rate, to be clear. Life expectancy as gone up by mere years over the decades, while births per adult woman is still double digit in a few select countries.
Biology is a field that’s growing explosively these days, though, and I fully expect aging to settle down suddenly. I’ll have to look up what Logan’s Run is.
Edit: 30 is definitely too low for a maximum age, lol. People commonly work into their 60s. I expect that decline in age will slow down as well, so that helps offset things, and then if there’s still a population crunch geezers like me should start doing “lotteries”. Maybe literal Russian roulette, for the style factor.
The issue is growth rates are wildly different among different areas and cultures. The population in some places is dropping precipitously which will cause economic problems, especially around elder care.
While I agree that a gradual population reduction would be beneficial, rapid declines will increase human suffering and should be avoided.
different areas and cultures
It’s really more wealth and education based. Muslim Kazakhstan has a birth rate near replacement, neighboring Tajikistan has a big one, and Afghanistan a couple of stans down has one sky high. Further south yet, India still has a very family-centric culture, but they’ve dropped below replacement now.
All problems right now, when there’s a global surplus, are due to lack of immigration. I say we work on that.
Once it levels off we may have to think about whether we want to degrow the population
The problem is this is one of those long term things that people have a hard time understanding. By the time you see it level off, it’s decades too late to change things. Let’s not make the same mistake as we continue to do with climate: instead of putting it off until it becomes a crisis let’s make small changes now so the crisis doesn’t happen.
We definitely can’t grow population forever and are likely beyond a sustainable population already, but let’s try for a smooth leveling off and soft landing rather than flying off a cliff and crashing into the rocks
Hmm. So how should we go about that today? Trying to raise population growth in developed countries, besides having proven very hard to do ethically, makes the problem with a high peak population worse.
It being hard to do is all the more reason to start now. We certainly don’t want to step back in human rights or healthcare so perhaps our only choice is incentives or assistance. Yes, that has proven not very effective so far but our only choice is to try. Perhaps assistance and incentives need to go a bit farther. I know I found a lot more challenges to being a parent than just the cost. Perhaps there’s some social statuses that need to be changed but are subject to generational inertia: when does being a parent confer status or respect, or at least not stunt your career?
Yeah, if it works we’re back to worrying about overpopulation, which is far worse. It’s a moral hazard. I was hoping you had a third option. Otherwise, no, let the birth rate collapse.
Doubt we even need them unless its for organs. Companies are always trying to do more with less. It’s better to just not hire more staff that retired or left than laying off some. Smaller well educated population is better than bloated useless one.
Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and guess that 1 or 2 billion is enough long-term to retain all the diversity of lifestyle we’ve come to love, and then each person will be able to safely consume many times more.
that is the level I think the world could handle and recover year to year (well if it was not overtaxed to begin with) and allow folks to have a modern type of lifestyle with our current don’t try crappy way of doing things.
I read 10k was minimum for space colony to keep good biodiversity. We can lose pops for a while. So long as automation keeps up.
Yeah. I’m guessing technologies would start to get lost if we went below a million without careful planning, but even then we have centuries of exponential decrease to go before we’re really in trouble.
Even without automation, less people means less consumers, so the only pain is short term as there’s a ton of decrepit old people (like me if I’m still around) for the youth to care for. Some large projects might lose economy of scale, but then again anything finite like land will get way cheaper.
Lost knowlege has precedent in history. That’s when 40k style Standard Template Construct come into effect. Which We already started with chat gpt and such. Just need to optimize it. Bigger issue is if humanity will progress In technology or remain stagnate.
People keep saying we need to worry about elderly but realistically if there is less manufacturing or service jobs from automation and people don’t want robot carer’s then technically there would be more care jobs open. Seems like will sort itself out in the end.
Bigger issue is if humanity will progress In technology or remain stagnate.
That’s also a good point. There is a quote, “society progresses one funeral at a time”. That goes for social progress, and to a degree for scientific progress as well.
I’m going to go ahead and say I don’t want today’s old people in charge forever.
Seems like will sort itself out in the end.
Yeah, I’m not terribly worried about everything else; we got lucky inventing mass contraception when we did.
I don’t know. Do we really need to replace another 8.2 billion people, does that line really need to go up?
No, but we also don’t want that line to suddenly plummet either.
Think of it this way: birth rate of one is half replacement value and most developed countries are there. We’re already having half the children we need to stay level but it’s not obvious because of the larger generations still living. In 20 years, that half population will half yet again, one quarter the children to level off. Then those older generations age out, and you get larger generations replaced by multiple halvings. For example if you live three generations, then at the end of your life, the population is only 1/8 what it was. Obviously it won’t be this simple and many things could affect birthrate but I find this trend frightening for humanity’s future. We’re not talking lower population but facing the possibility of a crashing population
The birthrate BS is already being used as reasons for controlling women. The only down fall is Religious nut bags and Republican assholes losing control over the other sex.
A better way of life automatically equals the natural number of children. There’s no need for another 9 billion people. There is a very strong need of a better life for 8 billion of us.
There’s no need for another 9 billion people. There is a very strong need of a better life for 8 billion of us.
Agreed, but there are many possibilities for where this trend heads and when it levels out.
- there’s no need for a chaotic, disrupted life for 5 billion of us
- there’s no need for widespread societal collapse as we no longer have the population to afford the infrastructure we’ve built out
- there’s no need to live in a dystopia of limitation with collapsing hope and vision, dying innovation and arts, ever constriction g, ever decreasing
If we try to tweak the birth rate starting now, we’re more likely to land at a sweet spot like “ a better life for 8 billion of us.”
And no, controlling women is not the way. Being evil always seems the faster and easier path, but where do you end up? Evil
Maybe we don’t need more people in the world?
I’m so glad I didn’t selfishly pull my unborn children out of perfectly peaceful nonexistence and into this horrid timeline.
“I love my unborn children far too much to bring them into this dumpster fire of a society.”
My parents were pestering the wife and I about when we’re going to give them grandbabies. Hit em with that line a few years ago, and they haven’t brought it up since.
The idea of having a kid in today’s world just seems cruel.
good luck with the greedy little fuck twat corporations believing that their workers exist solely for the purpose of making their owners richer
The world population has nearly doubled in my lifetime. That’s not sustainable. We need to build systems that promote and function within a state of equilibrium.
The first publishing of “Limits to Growth” suggested that if immediate actions were done to curtail growth and use of resources, the world could possibly in many decades peak and then come back down to a sustainable flat line. That was in 1970. 54 years ago we may have had a chance - although the research didn’t include many things not known to them, including the impact of climate change that was already underway and just not obvious (the ocean was buffering much of the effects for a long time).
My non-scientific opinion is that crossing the line of hunter-gatherer to agriculture was the real point of no return. We gained a lot from that, but it also sealed our path and fate. Finding the rich energy source of petroleum was the final accelerant.
2 billion was perfect. Let’s get back to that and stay there.
Oh, someone else who read ‘The Ministry for the Future’?
mmmm smells like something that quickly leads to eugenics. the amount of people currently alive isn’t an issue. declining birth rates are. we can’t rely on an expanding population forever, but until we can declining birth rates will be an issue.
We simply need money.
Give me 3x my finances and I’ll have 2 kids.
Edit: There appears to be a significant lack of education in this comment thread.
not if the cost goes up 3x to. give me enough for a house and yard and reliable car or make reliable transit where the house is and enough for the family to eat healthy with some spoilage treat behavior and get them standard stuff like a laptop and have decent chance for a good educaton and in my case make me 30 years younger.
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Prices are not, for the most part, set by a regime. It’s dumber than that, it’s just concentrating itself for math reasons.
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Money is not enough, especially if both parents have to work. At least as importantly, most of us no longer have the support of extended family and communities, or the ability to have a stay at home parent to help make it work and those are equally important
The article covers that. So far handout policies have only given a transient spike in births.
Handouts are not enough for me to not pull out.
I need more income. There is a massive difference.
Fair.
I personally just don’t want kids, for reasons that have nothing to do with money. I don’t know for sure how many people that applies to, but I’m guessing it’s not insignificant. In another time it wasn’t a choice unless you wanted to be celibate.
Yep, this means we need to try even harder. It’s a good thing that we’ve gotten to the point where people have more choices and are more in control of their own lives. We should never have to give this up.
However then the future of our society depends even more on fewer people deciding to have more children. Why would they decide to do that? How can we help make this choice easier for them?
That doesn’t mean they don’t work. It could also mean they weren’t enough or they targeted the wrong things. With the future of our entire society at stake, surely we can spend more than a slightly better tax deduction.
I love my kids, but everything is more expensive, more time consuming, requiring more coordination with more people. Plus how will you find people who want to have kids if they can’t even spend time with them, to help them grow and develop, and discover the world?
Yeah, I can’t say money couldn’t work, especially if it’s recurring like someone else said. It hasn’t to date though.
If we just tripled everyone’s finances, all it would do is cut purchasing power by a third.
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Is an high birthrate actually a good thing?
For the planet? No. For capitalism, yes.
Hard to have infinite growth without infinite growth.
Governments needs more slaves and army conscripts, hurry up and have more children
This exactly.
Without unemployment, without bullshit jobs and with automation, we could probably do all we do today just 1 billion people worldwide, no?
No. The world population has doubled in my lifetime. While I agree that’s too much, I see much faster scientific, medical and technology progress than ever before. I see more chance to be dreamers and explorers, more chances to build a better society. There’s more art, more freedom, and ever higher quality of life. We have been doing much better with more people.
I don’t know what an ideal number would be, but I expect it’s more than half the current population
Why do you think all that good stuff is due to more people rather than just technological advancement yielding faster technological advancement? The person tending to an ever growing landfill isn’t an essential component of modern life. The well-functioning landfill might be, but the person is just moving trash around. Replace them with a robot and the trash still gets moved around, will no reduction in art, freedom, or QoL.
More people gives more opportunity for specialization. Smaller percentage of people required to make life work(shelter, food, water,m, waste management) means more people free to try innovation or art or explration
You’re just not addressing automation at all. We have no where close to a billion people specializing in tasks that can’t either currently or in the near-term future be either automated entirely or made so efficient the required workforce would be drastically reduced. You don’t need 4 billion people to maintain (and improve) our standard of living and we’re rapidly approaching the point where many jobs are better automated than done by people.
If you want people to be free to innovate or make art or explore, the best way to do that is to not have them working pointless jobs for half their waking hours.
I still think that has not been because we have more people producing. It is because there is a lower fraction of poverty. There is no point in having more people while there are still people living in misery.
Society at large says weath, career, possessions and vacations are the most important thing. Those are all easier without children.
Things would be a lot different if household and caring tasks would be seen as important and not just some unpaid chore to be dumped on women. If instead of business class it would be family class to give those traveling with
chickenchildren the best seats.But that is unthinkable in a capitalistic system.
I would always travel with chicken if that was the case!
Chicken class is best class
They could they’re just not willing to do what would be required.
