"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell." -Edward Abbey
Economic growth is not "for the sake of growth;" it's for the sake of wealth.
The Population Bust
71–80 of 182 posts
Re: The Population Bust
#72I keep being surprised that this is surprising to anyone. This is a commonly-observed pattern in biology; a simple graph called the Gompertz function ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz_function ) is often used to model it. I guess most folks have always assumed that humans were somehow exempt from the natural laws, maybe because of the much greater degree to which we are able to reshape our environment to suit…
Unless I'm missing something, the Gompertz function you refer to has an implicit model that the organism's population stabilizes because of Malthusian constraints, a lack of some kind of resource.
But birth rates have been declining in first-world countries for a long time in the absence of this kind of constraint, and the Foreign Affairs article specifically notes that both Malthus and Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" doomsday resource-shortage scenarios didn't come to pass.
The Earth certainly does have some kind of carrying capacity for humans, but that's not the limit that's being it, it's something else.
Re: The Population Bust
#73[flagged]
Re: The Population Bust
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mechanism is that the propensity to have more children is partly genetic. So as people with those genes out-breed the rest of the population, those genes come to predominate in the population. Thus overcoming the demographic transition. Here is a recent paper that models this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... The Black Death is pretty well accepted as a contributor to the end of feu…
> The mechanism is that the propensity to have more children is partly genetic. So as people with those genes out-breed the rest of the population, those genes come to predominate in the population. Thus overcoming the demographic transition. Is this entirely a genetic thing or are there also cultural components? I’ve long entertained a crackpot theory that North America will be almost entirely Mormon or Roman Cathol…
> I’ve long entertained a crackpot theory that North America will be almost entirely Mormon or Roman Catholic in 200 years, partially for this reason.
Or Muslim, although that's more likely in Europe at this point.
> The only reservation being that secular-humanist culture seems to convert people from more traditional cultures even faster than they reproduce....
Perhaps in a few hundred years secular humanism will be seen a memetic Black Death.
Re: The Population Bust
#75Re: The Population Bust
#76This phenomena is why I'm strongly pro-immigration. Speaking as an American, I want there to be more Americans. We're not making them ourselves so we need to import. The more we import now, the better since the current population is both younger and more numerous than it will be in a few decades when we'd actually need the imported population. Doing it now means the Americanization of the immigrants will be more comp…
Problem 1: who would want to come to a country where they can be indoctrinated not to have babies? Problem 2: it is unethical for rich people to depend on the fertility and then parental obligations of poor people in order to produce new people who will then be taxed to pay for the sterile old rich person. That is asking someone else to do all your hard work for you for free.
“..new people who will then be taxed to pay for the sterile old rich person. That is asking someone else to do all your hard work for you for free.“
Um do you live here? That is basically how the economy works.
Re: The Population Bust
#77I’m not convinced that the decline in birth rates is just because more children survive; that’s an assumption that as far as I know, nobody has ever rigorously checked. It smells fishy.
There are other possible explanations: birth control becoming available, women having to work full time, children are no longer exploitable cheap labor.
The big picture is that capitalism will only invest in something if the investor is able to also claim the gains. But the profits of having children go to society in general, not to a specific investor, therefore our children are under supported. The solution is probably going to either be socialism, or some sort of investment scheme where capitalists will pay people to have children but then they’ll be indentured servants or something.
Go ahead and call me crazy then come back and look at this post in 50 years.
Edit: actually it would probably work something like: we, babycorp, will pay you 250,000 dollars to pop out a baby, she will go to the finest schools, she will want for nothing, but at the age of 30 she will have to pay back the debt, with interest. (Which she can do by having kids of her own). This is basically how capitalism thinks, admit it, it’s not that far fetched.
Re: The Population Bust
#78I keep being surprised that this is surprising to anyone. This is a commonly-observed pattern in biology; a simple graph called the Gompertz function ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz_function ) is often used to model it. I guess most folks have always assumed that humans were somehow exempt from the natural laws, maybe because of the much greater degree to which we are able to reshape our environment to suit…
Unless I'm missing something, the Gompertz function you refer to has an implicit model that the organism's population stabilizes because of Malthusian constraints, a lack of some kind of resource. But birth rates have been declining in first-world countries for a long time in the absence of this kind of constraint, and the Foreign Affairs article specifically notes that both Malthus and Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bom…
It's often observed that as societies grow richer, their birthrate plummets. The paradox is that in order to tap into those riches people have to work more, which may be one of the explanations for why the population tends to decline in those countries.
Thus the constraint may just be "time to make babies".
Re: The Population Bust
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless I'm missing something, the Gompertz function you refer to has an implicit model that the organism's population stabilizes because of Malthusian constraints, a lack of some kind of resource. But birth rates have been declining in first-world countries for a long time in the absence of this kind of constraint, and the Foreign Affairs article specifically notes that both Malthus and Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bom…
It's often observed that as societies grow richer, their birthrate plummets. The paradox is that in order to tap into those riches people have to work more, which may be one of the explanations for why the population tends to decline in those countries. Thus the constraint may just be "time to make babies".
Time and resources to make and support babies is a big constraint.
Most parents want to provide a standard of living to their kids that is better than what they grew up in, which costs significantly more to provide.
Kids didn't always have their own bedrooms or cellphones, and in an agrarian society kids were useful as extra "free" labor. The shift to cities has rewritten the economic calculations potential parents do.
Re: The Population Bust
#80I keep being surprised that this is surprising to anyone. This is a commonly-observed pattern in biology; a simple graph called the Gompertz function ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz_function ) is often used to model it. I guess most folks have always assumed that humans were somehow exempt from the natural laws, maybe because of the much greater degree to which we are able to reshape our environment to suit…
Unless I'm missing something, the Gompertz function you refer to has an implicit model that the organism's population stabilizes because of Malthusian constraints, a lack of some kind of resource. But birth rates have been declining in first-world countries for a long time in the absence of this kind of constraint, and the Foreign Affairs article specifically notes that both Malthus and Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bom…
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