This is a rather serious issue but very few people care. It is at least as important as global warming. Media and politicians don't care at all.
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What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
81–90 of 160 posts
Re: What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aging population, lower economic growth (less consumer demand for goods and services).
Aging population per se isn't a problem, because better hygiene, lower child mortality and enough food creates the same effect. Lower economic growth doesn't have to be. Fewer people means less supply on workforce means higher wages means higher purchasing power. The existing people would like to be more, but can't afford because of low wages. Fewer people will give them leverage.
Higher purchasing power per person not overall. That would increase the wealth inequality divide and the aging population would suffer as lower and middle class services struggle in favour of high wealth services. We are seeing that in clothing at the moment, high end clothing is doing really well but serves fewer people.
Japan is a country to watch, it has an aging population but historically good support for middle class services through lots of small businesses. If that changes for them it is a bad sign for the West, as we generally have greater wealth divides to begin with.
Re: What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? There are huge stretches of the world that are basically uninhabited. Even in densely populated places like Europe there are large areas with low population density. People are crowding in cities and then complaining that there are too many people. Resource drain is no longer an issue once we got an economy running on photovoltaics and nuclear energy. Everything can be recycled given enough energy.
> There are huge stretches of the world that are basically uninhabited. Like the proposed site for Resolution Copper, say? Nobody there save the people that got pushed aside when Europeans arrived in the US and I guess there's no issue with pushing them on again, treaties are meaningless and 8 billion people need their appliances. > Resource drain is no longer an issue once we got an economy running on photovoltaics…
> Your comment has the whiff of Magical Tech thinking to it.
Well, your post has the whiff of malthusian doomerism to it. Look up the Simon-Ehrlich wager. Ehrlich was wrong in every single respect. There are more people, yet they are economically better off. And nothing has run out.
And yet the ideology of Ehrlich and Malthus has prevailed in the west.
Re: What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
#84> No one really knows why birth rates are dropping so fast. [...] Many people have theories but if you critically examine them they fall apart. > [#1] People do not have money for kids. [#2] The Government isn’t Providing pro-natal policies. [#3] This is happening only in societies that are not religious. [#4] Women are working and not having kids. That seems like an incomplete list. For example, how about this one:…
I'm not having kids because I expect the world they would live in by the time they would be adults will be too dystopian. Even more dystopian than it is already.
I opine that we humans increasingly shape our living situation such that it causes friction with our nature, our primitive psychology and biology. This friction causes increasing unhappiness. When I first realized this in my early twenties I was able to vastly increase my happiness (up to a bearable level, luckily) by removing many such man-made unnatural aspects from my life.
However, I expect that the ability to remove oneself from or avoid man-made degeneracies will be extremely difficult or impossible in a matter of decades. Even my unborn children I love too much to force them into that.
Given these expectations I consider it selfish to the degree of evil to have children. Mind, I do not consider it selfish or evil to have children. Only if you do it with the expectation that they will live in a virtual hell.
I do generally enjoy life, spending time with friends and family, working on a project I am passionate about, pursuing interests, making an effort to be healthy. However, I expect that the degeneracy will increase to a point where a person's happiness would be net negative.
Re: What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is at least as important as global warming. Global warming is irreversible, low birth rates are not.
"Irreversible" feels like an overstatement for a planet that has documented swings in both its temp and atmospheric composition. I'd agree the timescales of changing warming trends is certainly slower than birth rates, though.
Fine, irreversible on a human scale. The last time the earth was this hot (known as the Eemian period) was back when humans just started migrating from northern Africa to the Arabian peninsula, ~125000 years ago.
That's a whole lotta damage done in under 200 years since we industrialized.
Re: What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it serious?
Most countries social security systems rely on workers today paying in. The dependency ratio of workers to people on pensions may get to the point where it breaks. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOPDPNDOLUSA
Yeah, but more worker doesn't automatically mean more money for pensions.
What matters is productivity and the workers share of it.
Fewer workers with higher wages have the same effect on pension payments.
Re: What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, a support network is one thing. My grandparents certainly babysat me on occasion, but me and my partner are quite far away (over an hours drive) away from any close family. Naturally my parents are also a lot older than my grandparents were as well, so it would be less fair on them. I really don't think the phenomenon of people having fewer kids or having kids later is a mystery!
When I was growing up in the 80s, working class neighborhood, most wives had a part time job. Whoever was off that day would watch the kids. I remember sitting in random houses with 7 or so other kids, eating mac n cheese or bologna sandwiches, waiting for our moms to come pick us up after work. As an adult with my own kid now, it would seem such an idea is a pipe dream.
Yeah, the decline in neighbourlyness would be an even more interesting phenomenon to study.
My person hunch is back in the day there was a more "we're all in the same boat" feeling at the street level, where everyone had similar socioeconomic backgrounds whereas now that's not true at all.
In the past, in the UK, everyone living in a road may have had the same landlord (the local council) but now you can have multi-millionaire with a £50K car living next door to someone in an identical house who is renting privately, on housing benefit, taking the bus to their minimum wage job, and struggling to feed their kids.
People are much more willing to give and receive help from their "peers"
Re: What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never said it’s not enjoyable to some. But raising a human has enormous costs.
I guess I don’t understand what you mean by “wasteful” then.
Poor choice of words. I meant enormous costs compared to what you get out of it. Though latter is hard to quantify and depends on each family.
Re: What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
#89> No one really knows why birth rates are dropping so fast. [...] Many people have theories but if you critically examine them they fall apart. > [#1] People do not have money for kids. [#2] The Government isn’t Providing pro-natal policies. [#3] This is happening only in societies that are not religious. [#4] Women are working and not having kids. That seems like an incomplete list. For example, how about this one:…
https://news.ku.edu/2017/09/15/flint-water-crisis-led-lower-... People need access to clean water without chemicals in it that led to lower fertility rates and higher fetal death rates. Birth control pills put estrogen in the water supply: https://www.businessinsider.com/birth-control-pills-hormones... These could be true or maybe misleading or half true? Chemicals from medicine that people take should be filtered ou…
There are more fertility issues - probably the main cause is that people are having kids like 10-15 biological years older than a generation or two ago. I don’t think that’s the main cause though - or it should be visible in some kind of insane spike in fertility treatments
Re: What Will the World Look Like with Less Babies?
#90On one hand the guys on top are telling us that we're destroying the planet and we should reduce carbon emissions by any means necessary (dont touch their private airplanes and yachts though). On the other hand the same guys are saying we're rapidly going to collapse because we're not birthing enough consumers. Hilarious really