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Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
31–40 of 94 posts
Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
#32...maybe if didn't work so hard to make our socity into a hypercompetitive hellhole intelligent and educated people would also start having more children! Give people guranteed free life-time education from daycare to university + some standard of free universal healthcare (sure, you'll have to pay for your antiaging, but not for a broken leg!) and more people will enjoy having more children. Maybe engineer the world so that people who choose to "chill t f out" can still enjoy both wealth and security because we do generate surplus value no matter what some people want to make you think. Just prevent some people from overconsuming at the same time that we prevent other from overproducing and give social climbing advantages to less competitive and workaholic people.
One reason why I'm 100% for a mildly-socialistic world government thinggy putting some brakes on mindless growth and eavening things out - handing extra child care support to educated people in helthy societies and contraception to the others. Instead we have a global kabal that manufactures scarcity all over the place, and wars in some even less lucky places, and instead of family planning we have... wars, disease & famine. No idea why we've made these tradeoffs as a species!
Some of the "economical and technological growth" in our societies and economies is really not the right kind of growt (it's more like "cancerous growth"), and some mild redistribution plus hitting the breaks a bit would allow for a more thoughtful type of development so that we can handle safely the transmission of human intelligence and values to bio-humanity's descendents when that comes sooner or later...
Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
#33My sense was that this interpretation of work on the “behavioral sink” is quite off. I think most reasonable biologists and ecologists would agree that density-dependent stress tends to cause the pathologies of the type that are described in Calhoun’s work. The fact that there are occasional sparse zones in the pen is relevant insofar as it usually implied strong individuals excluding access to those parts of the pen…
We're not sure either (I wrote this with the primary author), but we agree there's something interesting going on. The research is brought up in the deep dive more as an interesting reference point and less as any sort of primary argument.
Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
#34Outside of high-tech solutions (external wombs, anti-aging) there's one social: a totalitarian country forcing women to have kids. The only country I could see it happening is China. In the absence of one of the three solutions, technological civilization will peak this century. It's not poverty or culture that leads to not having kids, it's industrialization. Any culture that automates agriculture to a sufficient le…
Outside high tech solutions, we could just make raising children cheap again. The cost of raising children into adulthood skyrocketed in the last century. No surprise people gave up on being parents. Just make sure housing is affordable, and subside public daycare, education up to university, and health assistance for would be parents, and a lot of people would proudly step forward.
Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
#35Not sure if poster is also author, but generally when you want to share a Google docs document to be read (not edited) you should go to the "file"s menu > "share" > "publish to web" The published version isn't added to readers drive, it loads fast, is not limited by the number of concurrent readers, etc. etc.
Thanks! One of the authors here. We originally planned on having folks actively contribute edits and comments, though we've temporarily turned that on as there are quite a few people reading it now.
Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
#36[deleted]
Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hope our civilization can go from 7 billion people to 1 billion without a total collapse. Unfortunately we might not be ready. Will we be able to keep our technological level? Our current understanding of math, physics and nature? That requires quite a lot of people to transmit and learn. It certainly is theoretically possible but in practice? It's exponential. This has the potential to creep on us really so…
The issue lies in who those 1 billion people will be. The most anti-LGBT, anti-women, anti-education, low income cultures which have the most kids? Or a "controlled landing" in which most of the Western world doesn't become a ghost town or has its culture more or less replaced because it couldn't reproduce itself?
Is this what you are saying?:
“Feeble-mindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly indifferent to their racial responsibilities. And it is largely this type of humanity we are now drawing upon to populate our world for the generations to come. In this orgy of multiplying and replenishing the earth, this type is pari passu multiplying and perpetuating those direst evils in which we must, if civilization is to survive, extirpate by the very roots.” -- Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922
Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
#38Thanks for sharing this, I’m not an expert on the subject but I’m curious about it and, skimming through the document, it seems to touch many different aspects of it. I also appreciate the amount of graphs and links, and the direct and clear language you used. My impression is that this is way better than a typical news article touching this subject. Might not be saying much, but I’m going to keep a copy as the refer…
We appreciate the kind words! Ping us if you feel like there's an area that could use more thorough research, there is counter evidence we should be considering and featuring, etc.
Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
#39I threw together an easily sharable document covering the current data on birthrates and it's implications.
Yeah and as I read it I saw a guy called anonymous armadillo writing a section on how falling birth rates are due to the MeToo movement. Is this all just crowd sourced random guesswork with no evidence?
Thanks for the heads up.
We've been soliciting additional information, counter evidence, criticism, etc. from folks who read the Google Doc since we would like our understanding of the subject to be as clear-eyed as possible. That said, we've disabled comments/suggestions temporarily since a ton of people are reading it concurrently and we want to be able to properly review suggested additions before many other people start reading them; we'd like to vet the ideas in it as much as possible.
Re: Why falling birthrates might be a bigger deal than dominants narratives imply
#40"Demographic Apocalypse", Jeez. I for one see more dystopian scenery originating in the hell-bent overpopulation we've been witnessing on the planet for the past 100 years or so. We're looking at ~1'000 places with a population of 500'000 up to 37'000'000 these days (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities); they comment, quite correctly IMHO: There are quite a number of popular and culturally rich cit…
I really hope our civilization can go from 7 billion people to 1 billion without a total collapse. Unfortunately we might not be ready. Will we be able to keep our technological level? Our current understanding of math, physics and nature? That requires quite a lot of people to transmit and learn. It certainly is theoretically possible but in practice? It's exponential. This has the potential to creep on us really so…
In hindsight I should've probably not make 1b (1800) but rather the 1.65b of 1900 the goal, just because from a time frame and as a vision it is so much easier to communicate: around the turn of the century we already had electric streetcars, electric underground, electric lighting, motorcars, elevators, entire countries with rail networks and so on. I do not see why a slow-ish-ly shrinking population should entail tossing all of our advances since then—in medicine, computers, telecommunication, chemistry, virtually all fields, not least agriculture (although the way we do it now is utterly unsustainable). Rather, I believe that in a situation where you have an extremely high birthrate and a doubling of the population in a matter of just 15 or 30 years you end up with half of population being rather young and lacking experience; you will also, as an economy, have a hard time to build enough schools and housing. People will and already do live, in many places, in cities that are almost entirely without any built history to speak of. This is what erodes local traditions, customs, awareness; I see this and not the OP's notion of 'shrinking societies cause cultural attrition and global homogenization' (paraphrased from memory) as a major cultural problem. Population growth, not shrinkage, is a great contributor to cultural loss.