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Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

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Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#81

Post by abenga »

rayiner wrote: post #77
silverquiet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a society structures itself in such a way that no one wants (or is able) to continue it, then it will die and others may arise in its place. For myself I don't believe I have the wherewithal for it regardless of my view on the matter of selfishness. >The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower level…

I agree with your first point. Societies that socialize people to prioritize individual “happiness” over fulfilling social obligations will die out and better societies will take their place.

I think Asian societies have a higher collectivist "the collective over the individual" culture than others, and their populations are the fastest declining currently.

Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#82

Post by Balgair »

anonzzzies wrote: post #3

Besides feeding the economy (and by that, I mean buying consumerist stuff from large corps) and providing the army with cannon fodder, I still haven’t haven’t heard a lot of good arguments for having these babies. Humanity would shrink (I think this is calculated to start after 2050 or so), but besides those two reasons, does that matter? Where is the foundation of the argument that we must have population growth to…

More people generally is better.

I do some fantasy world-building in the little free time I have. The setting is diesel-punk/atom-punk, so 1950s era. A little bit of disco-punk mixed in too. Essentially, modern post-war USA.

So, when I try to model a city, or a country in this era, you gotta go after the data. Because we actually have it for this setting.

Medieval data is just horrible in comparison. The high fantasy settings will get a little bit of data on city dynamics and some on 'nation' level data and the like. But most of the modeling is starting from pretty much guessing with wide errorbars.

But in the atom-punk setting I have, there is just mountains of data from all over the world. It makes modeling really easy and you can get really fine-grained about it (much to the detriment of story-telling, I get lost in those tables and charts, happily so).

One thing that really stands out in trying to model this data is that population is literally everything.

How grimy a city is, how tall the skyscrapers are, the walking speed of people in the city, the talking speed of bank tellers, the number of patents per capita, the monthly charge for sewer access, tonnage of warships, the length of subway track and it's heights, etc. Pretty much every metric will correlate best with the population of the area. It's not just cities, it's states and countries and smaller towns too. Really anything about the setting and world-building is best modeled by looking at the population first and then working from there.

To be clear here, not the population density. The only metric I could find in my notes that better correlated with population-density was the number of subway stops on a line. I'm sure there are other examples, too.

But, in the years that I've been doing this, the number one thing that seems to pop out to me is: Raw population is everything.

Now, I'm mostly interested in themes and settings and the like. But most of the data is coming from the motivation of trying to increase the quality of life of people. So I get to stare at that a lot and make graphs.

And I can say from my eyeballing of all this data over the last few years: More people = better.

Most of the metrics we use to quantify if things are 'good' or 'bad' will correlate with more people = better. It's not, by any means, a 1-1 thing. This is human population stuff, If you see a r2 value of, like, 0.6, that's pretty darn good. There is a lot of noise here and the stats that are taken have just huge issues with them.

I'm not going to be able to really prove this, I'm just mucking around with a setting and world-building. But from the years that I have been staring at my poorly organized notes and the various governmental and NGO data tables, the underlying message is that things get better with more people around.

Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#83

Post by iteratethis »

Sometimes the simplest explanation is best. In record time, we went from a situation where having children is required at the personal level to a situation where it is a personal choice.

When given the choice, most still want children. How many? 2. As some want 0 or 1, this averages out to the typical 1.5 - 2.0 range as seen in most countries. Which is below replacement.

Most people maxing out at 2 children makes sense. Two children already give a full and rich family experience, both the joy and its burdens.

There's no incentive to go for 3, 4, 5. You may not have space for them in your home, car or schedule. A cold thing to say perhaps, but there's diminishing returns.

Money doesn't fix this, it doesn't move the needle. Yet people will passionately argue that if only homes were cheaper and childcare free, we'd boost that number. It makes little difference. There is no quick policy fix for this.

It's also extremely hard to get people to care about this because for anybody alive today, they'll experience the world as getting ever more crowded for another 4 decades.

Fundamentally, I think individualism is at the root of the problem. We've sacrificed the institute of family and community to the economy. Modern couples are increasingly financially independent workers. We outsource childcare to strangers so that we can maximize work. There's no neighborhood or community support network because they are at work too. We outsource elderly care, again so that we can maximize work.

The irony of a dual income career culture is that it drives up the cost of living but an even more counter-intuitive effect is that it's a major cause of worker shortages. Why? Because all the wealth this labor produces fuels an ever growing demand, of which much is consumerist bullshit.

We won't change though. We will have all our bells and whistles and double down on this path.

Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#84

Post by RestlessMind »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #57
CogitoCogito wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying it's selfish to not have kids? Other than accidental parents, I've never met any who didn't have kids because they wanted them. How were they not acting selfishly?

It's interesting to see this comment downvoted. I'm honestly curious as to the thinking here. How are parents having kids because they want them not acting selfishly?

Actually both parents and non-parents exhibit selfishness, just of different flavors.

Parents have natural urges to have kids (literally, evolution!). So it is self-explanatory.

Non-parents will need a younger generation when they grow old for satisfying all the Maslow hierarchies of needs (food, medical care, entertainment, funding social safety nets etc). So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are consciously offloading their old-age care and hence act selfishly.

People in both categories may not be aware of their own flavor of selfishness.

Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#85

Post by RestlessMind »

silverquiet wrote: post #27
Havoc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> atheists who think we have some kind of evolutionary imperative Procreation kinda is an evolutionary imperative- atheism or not

I'm not super thrilled about being compelled by evolution or a god.

Then I suggest you introspect and observe your own behavior. A lot of it can be boiled down to evolution.

Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#86

Post by iteratethis »

atoav wrote: post #35
gizmo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economists are worried because (retirement) savings are nothing more than a claim on future labor. As people grow older and are less capable of taking care of themselves other people need to care for them. People can be secure in their retirement when the number they have saved is sufficient to purchase the labor they need later in life. But what will the price of that labor be when birth rates collapse and there…

The fact is that my parents generation (currently retiring) made a bet on the younger generations supporting them through the retirement [insert socialism joke if you're from the US]. I never signed up to this tho, I have been born into it. Now I agree that the whole thing is in principle a good idea, but all fairness goes out of the window as soon as a your demographics are such that the biggest voting block is at t…

What do you suggest regarding the social contract?

I'm asking because whatever policy you'd like to see applied to the current elderly, is to be applied with twice the intensity to yourself, as the generation behind you is even smaller.

Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#87

Post by RestlessMind »

silverquiet wrote: post #36
gizmo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economists are worried because (retirement) savings are nothing more than a claim on future labor. As people grow older and are less capable of taking care of themselves other people need to care for them. People can be secure in their retirement when the number they have saved is sufficient to purchase the labor they need later in life. But what will the price of that labor be when birth rates collapse and there…

First, I'd say that if those politicians are so worried, then perhaps they should work on building societies that people actually want to bring children into. Mainly though, I wonder - where is all the extra productivity that has supposedly developed over the last half century or so? Shouldn't that be able to cover over a declining population?

We can ensure adequate supply of basic necessities... to the standard of the 1960's (food choices and availability, houses, cars, medical care, entertainment options etc). Problem is that someone living 1960's lifestyle would be considered poor today. And if old people realize that they are going to have a "poor lifestyle" in their retirement, a lot of political problems will follow.

Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#88

Post by shrimp_emoji »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #52
gmerc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to optimizing the Genius efficiency by making structural changes. It’s the most stupid of arguments for growth. Everyone in funnel optimization knows that.

Like I mentioned in my original comment (weird how many times I had to type this today), we can get by having a smaller population with western levels standard of living; there's a bit more detail on this in my last paragraph of my comment.

On the bright side, we're probably a couple of centuries away from being able to genetically engineer geniuses and avoid having to play the numbers game.

Genetic engineering might also be a way out of the reproductive Ponzi scheme. Grow ready-made adults in pods! No painful stupid 25-year investment period with uncertain payoff.

Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#89

Post by Mewit »

The other day my boss said something along the lines of "there's too many people in the world", and seemed genuinely surprised when I pointed out articles like this one showing overall humanity is on the road to start shrinking over the next few decades. I think a lot of people still believe we're in the population bomb scenario Ehrlich painted in 1968, when actually we're looking more like a sad "Children of Men" scenario, particularly in developed countries.

I wonder what the end game of this decline is. The population of countries couldn't go to zero (right?). So at some point fertility rate must rebound. But at what point? 50% of the current population? 20%? 5%? Could we (or our great grand children, if we have any) see a world with just 2 million people living in Japan, finally beginning to grow again?

It seems to me if there is ANY sub group in the country reproducing above the 2.1 replacement rate, eventually they will come to dominate the population, if they pass this inclination on to their children. The "bottoming out" of the population might be determined by the relative size of that sub group today, and how much over replacement rate they are reproducing at. So maybe in America, the population bottoms out at 100 million people, with Mormons making up 50% of those, and as time goes on the population slowly grows and becomes more and more Mormon.

The other thing I think may happen, at least in more authoritarian countries like China, is that the state steps in directly. If offering tax breaks and free day care just aren't moving the needle (which they haven't so far), governments set up, for lack of a better term, "baby farms". Giving birth is turned into a full time job, completely separate from raising the children, which is done by some other state institution, and the population is stabilized that way.

Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed

#90

Post by silverquiet »

RestlessMind wrote: post #87
silverquiet wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I'd say that if those politicians are so worried, then perhaps they should work on building societies that people actually want to bring children into. Mainly though, I wonder - where is all the extra productivity that has supposedly developed over the last half century or so? Shouldn't that be able to cover over a declining population?

We can ensure adequate supply of basic necessities... to the standard of the 1960's (food choices and availability, houses, cars, medical care, entertainment options etc). Problem is that someone living 1960's lifestyle would be considered poor today. And if old people realize that they are going to have a "poor lifestyle" in their retirement, a lot of political problems will follow.

I don’t really understand why we would be limited to the 60’s. My house was actually built in the 50’s though. It’s think a modern car built with 60’s amenities but modern engine management and design could be crazy efficient and affordable; I’d be a buyer there for sure. And obesity was much lower back then, so it hardly sounds like the food situation was bad. I guess the problem for me is that I live a fairly poor lifestyle already and actually rather enjoy it, so it’s hard for me to imagine it as such a problem.
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