Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 427 posts

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#331

Post by gavin_gee »

gromitss wrote: post #245
zpeti wrote: post #48

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…

As cheap labor goes down, we are going to be forced into massive automation. There are plenty of challenges around this but the primary problem is going to be the massive concentration of wealth into a few hands. There has to be some form of redistribution that plays well with game theory and doesn’t sour a powerful segment of the population into being against it.

one hope is innovation in creating virtual worlds will distract the population from what is already happening.

the question is whether these worlds are a mirror or a replacement for the physical reality

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#332

Post by closeparen »

glitchc wrote: post #298
closeparen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prices show that people in the US have a goal of living lower-footprint lifestyles in walkable urban areas. We can't always get what we want. But which goals are attainable depends on policy choices.

They very much show the opposite over the past couple of years, ever since the pandemic. Housing prices in suburban and rural areas have exploded across North America. People seem to want their own slice of land distant from others.

On the margins, sure, there suburbs are gaining a little relative to the city. On the whole, though, cities are vastly more in demand than suburbs.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#333

Post by lotsofpulp »

decremental wrote: post #313
frosted-flakes wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than stay-at-home mothers not re-entering the workforce. Which is the alternative.

I don't get why mothers not being at home is seen as bad. As though it's a greater good for society that instead they're punching in numbers into a spreadsheet at a widget factory. Sounds to me like the only winner there is the widget factory. It didn't used to have to be this way and maybe we should figure out why it has to be that way now, then fix that.

>As though it's a greater good for society that instead they're punching in numbers into a spreadsheet at a widget factory.

It might not be the greater good for society, but it is good for women who want to be self sufficient.

>It didn't used to have to be this way and maybe we should figure out why it has to be that way now, then fix that.

It turns out that many women want to have financial freedom (i.e. freedom), and are willing to sacrifice a lot on the homemaking front to have it.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#334

Post by lotsofpulp »

closeparen wrote: post #330
rhacker wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're definitely in a filter bubble.

I recognize it's a filter bubble that talks about these things a lot on the internet, but $1000+/sqft for NY and SF condos aren't lying. People want these things, badly.

I suspect many of the people who want those $1k/sq ft condos in NYC and SF would not appreciate a fossil fuel tax sufficiently high to curb air travel such that even annual vacations to tropical destinations are not possible.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#335

Post by closeparen »

tsycho wrote: post #295
zpeti wrote: post #48

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…

On the other side, unfettered population growth for the purposes of maintaining a sufficiently large proportion of young people (in a world where people are living longer as well) is basically a Ponzi scheme. We’ll have to eventually stabilize to a sustainable demographic distribution; the earlier the better.

The distinguishing feature of a Ponzi scheme is the lack of any real productive activity. The growth on paper is fake. We care about working-age population because working-age people are actually out there fighting entropy to provision the stuff we like, and there's more or less of it to go around depending on how much of that is happening. That's reflected on paper but it's also true in the world, in our standard of living.

Your statement "the earlier the better" makes no sense. Obviously at some point there are limits; we should do as well as we can within those limits. "We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible." What?

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#336

Post by michael1999 »

throwawaygal7 wrote: post #302
michael1999 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We entered the 20c with ~1.5Bp, and didn't hit 3 until we were ready to land on the moon. We have a loooong way to go before we run out of people to run an advanced economy. As for the grey-aristocracy: it's already here, just unevenly distributed. Bruce Sterling described it vividly in Holy Fire (1996). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359390.Holy_Fire

If the entire world had south Korean levels of fertility it would take... 70 or 80 years to end up with a couple billion people again. In reality the problem right now is we are adding about 100m people living on two dollars or less a day every year but nobody has any real solutions for getting them above the poverty line or slowing the growth of that segment.

What’s wrong with what we’ve been doing? Emancipate and educate women, vaccinate and educate children, and suppress the worst of male-supremacy ideologues, and fertility comes down.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#337

Post by betwixthewires »

xxpor wrote: post #296
gromitss wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As cheap labor goes down, we are going to be forced into massive automation. There are plenty of challenges around this but the primary problem is going to be the massive concentration of wealth into a few hands. There has to be some form of redistribution that plays well with game theory and doesn’t sour a powerful segment of the population into being against it.

Or productivity goes up, since we don't need a massive population doing menial tasks. Just like every time someone has said this for the last 300 years. Won't someone think of the people picking the seeds out of cotton?

This is a point I often make that people dismiss out of hand quite often. "People need jobs to have meaning, people need jobs to feed their families" and while thee are true, nobody really wants to screw toothpaste tube caps on toothpaste tubes for a living, and a world where nobody has to do that job is inarguably a better world for everyone.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#338

Post by rmk »

Ensorceled wrote: post #286
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figuring out what it actually means. The details are gory, and can be summarized simplistically by saying "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID". In other words, figuring out true disease toll is a rather ambiguous problem, as stated. Can someone point me to a referenc…

> "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID" My favourite take on this: "I have Type 1 diabetes. I am healthy enough to run ultramarathons. If I get attacked by a bear & the ICU has trouble managing my blood sugar while caring for my bear attack wounds...and I die... the bear is the cause of my death. "[1] But it's irrelevant since these meta studies always use excess deaths over average because of reportings issues (both…

Excess mortality is a rough proxy of death from COVID. In the bear attack example, the proximal cause of death is the Bear attack, and diabetes is a comorbidity. The death of the diabetic arose out of complications stemming from the bear attack, so it's reasonable to categorize it as a bear attack death.

I'm assuming that you are arguing that from the excess deaths standpoint, death from x vs. death with x both count as death from x, to which I agree. I also think it's a reasonable characterization.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#339

Post by rmk »

foolinaround wrote: post #241
rmk wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there are more pandemics and wars that intervene. This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. I think we are perhaps 80% of the way to an endemic with successive mutations becoming less and less lethal, so perhaps the true death toll is in the 15-20 million range. Any large scale war between nation-states can have a pretty high death toll if things escalate out of co…

> This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. A more accurate way to state would be "This pandemic and the varying response to it by different nations has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist."

That's pedantic, and useless accuracy. Excess deaths stem primarily from the pandemic. It would be even more accurate to say that "The obfuscation of the true nature of what was a deadly pandemic by a corrupt totalitarian state killed 10-12 million people", but that's totally irrelevant and distracting in this context.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#340

Post by closeparen »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #334
closeparen wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recognize it's a filter bubble that talks about these things a lot on the internet, but $1000+/sqft for NY and SF condos aren't lying. People want these things, badly.

I suspect many of the people who want those $1k/sq ft condos in NYC and SF would not appreciate a fossil fuel tax sufficiently high to curb air travel such that even annual vacations to tropical destinations are not possible.

Travel habits seem much easier to change than the built environment.
Post reply on HN