Serious thought/question: I think everyone can agree that reproduction is how you advance your gene pool to the next stage of the human species. Does this mean people who don't want kids are effectively weeding themselves out? And is this somehow a function of survival of the fittest (or natural selection) in action?
The global fertility rate is falling
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Re: The global fertility rate is falling
#412The Hacker News comment section tends to be factual, rational, and logical. So - this may be out of place, but here goes. When making decisions about whether or not to have children, we operate in a state of partial information. (This is of course true of all decisions.) I would like to contribute a bit of information. I'm 66, and have three children and four grandchildren. My adult children are the most wonderful pe…
This is a bit like hearing a successful startup founder speak about the joys of success. It’s absolutely correct, but it’s also just one data point. Keep in mind, most of the lonely old people you see have children. And I’m not sure it’s a good, caring thing to tell childless people that they will be lonely in old age, because it need not be true.
I have another data point. A dear friend died last month, after about two weeks in hospice. She had no children, but she did live in a large cohousing community. We did our best to manage visitors, but sometimes there were 5-10 people waiting to spend time with her. Which stressed the staff, and annoyed other residents.
So anyway, children aren't the only path.
Re: The global fertility rate is falling
#413I hope Humanity grows many orders of magnitude larger and expands across the galaxy. The universe will be a more interesting place. Some people here are saying this is good for the environment. Having 20% fewer people won't do that. Clean energy and other technology will. You can easily fit 100B humans on earth, with more of the earth dedicated to nature preserves. (Maybe a trillion people https://youtu.be/8lJJ_QqIVn…
Have you even explored Earth? You will never run out of places to explore in your lifetime. Your post reads like someone who doesn't go outside and thinks they've exhausted the Earth because they've been to a couple of theme parks in North America.
Have you ever been to a densely populated area? You seem to think it will be more interesting. I speak to fewer people in cities than I do in the countryside. Nobody in a city cares about you. And if they do it's probably wishing you weren't there.
We can't even live as we are now without constantly being at war. What makes you think a higher population will make that better? You suggest colonising other planets. Do you understand exponential growth? Going to another planet is not a solution even if it was possible.
Re: The global fertility rate is falling
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are thinking very short term and in a very narrow range of conditions around our current economic situation. We have never seen economic conditions remotely close to what we would see if the population were actually shrinking.
We have a good enough understanding of capitalism to know that the average person will not benefit from a shrinking labour pool. You have no clue just how devastating a shrinking population would be to an economy where the real average wage hasn't increased in 40 year.
So change the economic system? The balls to the wall neoliberal, winner takes all, no safety net model that the Anglo American world has been moving towards for the past thirty years is not the only one. The Anglo American post war consensus model which was more redistributory correlated with higher growth rates (not saying it caused them, kinda hard to tell) while the Northern European corporatist, Scandinavian mixed model and Japanese corporatist models have all been successful in both creating economic growth and distributing that wealth more evenly amongst the population. It has always entertained me that the one thing that the average Marxist and neo liberal share is a belief that there is only one type of capitalism.
Re: The global fertility rate is falling
#415The Hacker News comment section tends to be factual, rational, and logical. So - this may be out of place, but here goes. When making decisions about whether or not to have children, we operate in a state of partial information. (This is of course true of all decisions.) I would like to contribute a bit of information. I'm 66, and have three children and four grandchildren. My adult children are the most wonderful pe…
I'm not sure having children so you won't be lonely in old age is a good thing.
It also assumes a good relationship with your children which may not always be the case. Or that your children live (relatively) close to you.
Re: The global fertility rate is falling
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are thinking very short term and in a very narrow range of conditions around our current economic situation. We have never seen economic conditions remotely close to what we would see if the population were actually shrinking.
It's not actually that unusual for a country to have a shrinking population. Italy, Croatia, Lithuania, and a few other central and Eastern European countries currently have declining populations, as does Japan, some due to ageing and a drop in fertility and some due to that plus emigration. Economically and socially they've not entered into the death spiral some people seem to think will happen and are actually doin…
We haven't even seen this scenario play out yet. I'm from the region and I don't think it will turn into some Fallout-type scenario, but I think it will definitely impact the well-being of all citizens in these countries, some 20-30 years from now. It's hard to say yet if/how these countries will recover.
Re: The global fertility rate is falling
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here are two scary storylines that get discussed pretty regularly here on HN: a) AI and machine learning will raise productivity so much that they will steal millions of jobs from people. b) Global population will eventually go into decline, which will crash the economy by killing growth. But, these two stories look far less scary when considered together. In fact they seem directly complementary, although the timing…
C) We will develop anti-aging treatments due to increased funding of SENS and similar projects. Combine that with a universal basic income and robots and you get a much better picture of the future. Edit: we are also not taking into account artificial gestation methods that may be developed in the next 100 years. In 2120 it may seem as barbaric as child labor and other 19th century atrocities to actually have a woman…
If we are able to keep people alive for much, much longer but don't find a way to make their brains young and elastic again, we're going to be in for a very, very special kind of dystopia.
Re: The global fertility rate is falling
#418As the article states, women are choosing to have fewer children. There are multiple ways to read this, and you can take the materialist theory of them just being caught up in their careers, but I tend to fall into a more cynical interpretation: humans are social creatures, and we are acutely tuned in to threats around us. I think humans are becoming increasingly aware, consciously or unconsciously, that we are killing ourselves through destroying the planet and that there is no way we can sustain further population growth. Whether “focusing on your career” is the chicken or the egg in this situation is up for interpretation.
Re: The global fertility rate is falling
#419There's a short-term problem of society becoming "top-heavy", where there might not be enough young to pay for the continued care of the old. But in the long run this seems like a win. I wonder what impact it might have on climate projections.
what does it mean to "pay for" the continued care of the old. Unless we have such a population implosion that we can no longer produce food or run our factories, then we don't need to "pay for" anything. We can simply decide to distribute the resources necessary for the care of the old. The real cost of everything is the labor required to produce it, not the dollar value it receives in a market place. I don't think a…
Yes, but e.g. Japan faces a big problem where the labor pool will be a small part of the population, with a big noticeable slice involved in elder care. If current plans to automate large amounts of this work (and I worry that automating it could be horribly dystopian) do not succeed it will be a large problem. (Not to mention other types of resources that those not in the labor force consume besides direct care).
Re: The global fertility rate is falling
#420People used to want children so they could take care of you when you're older. I suppose people don't plan that far anymore.
Note - I'm not making this up. This is a real thing in Asia for example.