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The global population pyramid

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Re: The global population pyramid

#141

Post by cco »

bhouston wrote: post #25

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction…

This is weird to read because I celebrate shrinking countries, they represent a path forward towards high quality of life and lower ecological impact.

Why would it be an issue, assuming we weren't fighting a way, for a country to shrink? There will of course be some economic hurdles to over come as constant and unsustainable growth is done away with, but after that what is the issue?

Re: The global population pyramid

#142

Post by irrational »

chr1 wrote: post #82
bhouston wrote: post #25

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction…

If we are lucky a good solution to this problem could be significant increase in life expectancy and development of artificial womb that will allow people to have children later in life when they finally want to have children. But if the technological solution doesn't come soon enough the world will have to go through a much harder transition, trying to develop new culture that would combine aspects of secular societ…

Isn’t a future secular society unlikely when the people that are having large numbers of children are highly religious? It would seem that as the secular world keeps having fewer children that eventually the vast majority of people will be highly religious.

Re: The global population pyramid

#143

Post by tabtab »

fiblye wrote: post #28
bhouston wrote: post #25

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction…

>And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics. One of the worst things about using immigration as a solution is that it's merely a bandaid. The worst thing is that people who encourage mass immigration are (likely) unknowingly saying their country is more deserving of the temporary benefits of immigration, and t…

Re: The idea behind mass immigration is that you have a constant supply of workers and tax payers to subsidize the welfare of the retiring natives of a country.

Politicians run up deficits and then cover their boo boo via immigration. I'm not making a value judgement on immigration here, but politicians have a bad habit of sacrificing the future for current benefits largely because their political career is a relatively small slice of time. It's why we have debt and pension problems. True, voters play a part by having short memories, voting for instant gratification.

Re: The global population pyramid

#144

Post by chr1 »

chr1 wrote: post #56
Mirioron wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My worry is that at some point rich countries will start increasing in population again. In the past we thought that overpopulation is going to be a big global problem. It turned out that rich countries naturally ended up having fewer and fewer children. This stabilized their populations. And now we expect that this trend will continue. But why? What's to say that some shift in society won't trigger another populatio…

Why is that a worry? Half of the land on earth is a desert, and 70% of earth is covered by ocean, most of which is also a desert. If we had enough people in rich countries who would want to spend their money on moving to new places, we would already have floating cities and many more desalination plants, and those places simply by growing food for themselves, changing their local climate to a nicer one, and by contri…

A couple of years ago, i myself would downvote my comment above, as it is a complete heresy from a standpoint of someone who believes that people are ruining everything they are touching, and the world was so much nicer before technology, and i thought that simply having less people would solve climate change issues.

But unfortunately that's a very naive view. Even if all people were removed, arctic have already started melting, and it will continue releasing more and more CO2 and methane from it's huge deposits.

Having orders of magnitude less people have been tried already, and that didn't help mammoths and all the other animals that were driven to extinction by small groups of people.

Having no people at all have been tried too, and that was not particularly helpful for dinosaurs, that got killed by a meteorite, which can be stopped by a larger civilization than what we currently have.

In short I am lucky that i understood, that the belief that it is possible to have too many people, technology is harmful, and that we should go "back to nature", is a harmful and unfounded idea. But i'll be happy to listen to arguments supporting it if you have any:

Re: The global population pyramid

#145

Post by scruple »

lordnacho wrote: post #14

Perhaps a bit grim, but I'm actually visting my dad, who ended up in hospital a couple of days ago. He's survived, but he's not been in great health recently and I've been thinking a lot about life and death. In 1950 he'd have been about 6 years old. If you then look at the 2018 curve for 74 year olds, you can see a fairly large part of his cohort has passed. Looks like more than half actually, if I'm interpreting th…

We're around the same age, and our fathers are, as well. My father was recently hospitalized, another minor heart attack. He's been alive for the past 14 years thanks to a pacemaker. My oldest living uncle had bypass (5 bypasses!) surgery last week. My wife and I are well into the third trimester of a spontaneous multiples pregnancy. It feels like life and death are literally chomping at the bit on either side of me right now, and it's bringing out a lot of emotion. I'm trying to funnel that emotion and it's raw energy into journaling, to keep it from spilling out into my personal or professional life.

All of this backstory lends this visualization a bit of a different meaning or context for people like us who are in the middle of these situations.

> What's maybe a bit more surprising is for younger people, even though your annual loss is quite low, it's still there and accumulating. If you look at 1980, those of us nearing 40 in 2018 are slightly fewer, but it's noticeable.

This struck me, as well. But, for different reasons. My graduating class was marked with death by the 5th grade. We lost 7 kids between the 5th grade and graduation (a couple of suicides and a terrible car accident involving 2 cars of class mates). We lost 3 or 4 more before we had turned 20 (suicide, drugs and alcohol related deaths). Another half dozen or so in our 20s (drug and alcohol related deaths). In our 30s, cancer and other terminal disease have claimed a few. My graduating class was < 100 people, so for a while there this was a frequent topic with the group of people that I remain in contact with. I suppose that there have to be instances like this but it's interesting to see it presented in this visualization. Thinking about it now, we actually haven't lost anyone that I'm aware of since in the second half of our 30s. Maybe we're turning a new leaf.

Re: The global population pyramid

#146

Post by all2 »

cco wrote: post #141
bhouston wrote: post #25

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction…

This is weird to read because I celebrate shrinking countries, they represent a path forward towards high quality of life and lower ecological impact. Why would it be an issue, assuming we weren't fighting a way, for a country to shrink? There will of course be some economic hurdles to over come as constant and unsustainable growth is done away with, but after that what is the issue?

> ... they represent a path forward towards high quality of life and lower ecological impact.

Could you expand on "high quality of life"? I'm not sure how that follows from decreased population.

Re: The global population pyramid

#147

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

cerealbad wrote: post #128
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really saying that Anglo-American's not having enough children is the biggest blunder in world history?

The Anglo-American establishment is a power consensus after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, two world wars and decolonisation. It refers to the hand off of power from Great Britain to the US. It has nothing to do with "Anglo-Americans" unless you're talking about a specific small group of anglophile elite families from the north-east of America with political and industrial wealth. A ruling consensus was establis…

I believe calling it a game and using those analogies trivializes the ethical implication of some of your views. And while I definitely don't think "all human beings are playing equally for the interest of all others", I do think if the "ruling consensus" elects to share power with a more diverse group of people that would be in the greater interest of humanity in the long term.

Re: The global population pyramid

#148

Post by cryptonector »

diNgUrAndI wrote: post #61

Pensions are not sustainable. Current mandatory CPP contribution in Canada seems like that. It's a promise that government makes that we contribute now which is taken to cover the current senior citizens. What if there isn't enough working force when we get older? How would the government keep the promise?

Not only pensions. Individuals cannot save any kind of money for retirement on their own if there will be no one to give to in exchange for services after retirement.

We cannot save without children, and the only answer is more automation, or just tough it out until the hump is past and we can have a more stable population. Toughing it out is not easy: young people put off having children or avoid it altogether if they feel they can't afford it. Of course, young people today don't have to deal with the privations of yesteryear -- they have no idea, but no matter, they won't have children if it feels too difficult.

Re: The global population pyramid

#149

Post by ratboy666 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #126
c0vfefe wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true especially regarding divorce. Biasing divorce renumerations overwhelmingly towards one gender has greatly weakened the shared financial incentive to keep families intact.

A lot of that is due to historical societal reasons. In a society where one gender makes money and the other takes care of kids, I don't know how it could have been any other way. In today's society, what's fair is for the non-custody parent to help support the children by reimbursing the custody parent. Or in cases of joint custody, the one with higher income reimburses the one with lower income. Which I believe is…

Historically, you are wrong.

Custody of Infants Act 1839. Prior to this, men both "made the money" and received custody of the children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custody_of_Infants_Act_1839

FredW

Re: The global population pyramid

#150

Post by cryptonector »

jstanley wrote: post #2

It took me a few minutes to understand the chart shown here, I think because it has the dependent and independent axes inverted. To look at the number of people of a given age in a given year, you follow the line for that year, go down the left to find the given age, and see where it lines up at the top to get the number of people. The shading between the lines is irrelevant and just serves to confuse: the area under…

This is a very standard graph.
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