The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
1–10 of 409 posts
Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
#2Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
#3This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the social welfare state.
Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
#4This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the social welfare state.
Social welfare state will still exist, it'll just be more costly as drag than it is today (in the US, ~$1.1T/year of uncompensated caregiving occurs, for example). Capitalism is more the challenge, it's built on squeezing the aggregate working age population for profits, and that cohort is in terminal decline over the long term. Between global sovereign debt load [1] and the demand for future profits (slides 31-33 of this PDF), there will be sadness as the future has less and less humans to saddle these economic burdens on. Such are the breaks when you predicate a socioeconomic system on never ending growth, and growth is over because humans globally (for various complex and interwoven issues) are choosing to have less children or no children.
[1] https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt ("Global public debt surpasses $100 trillion in 2024.")
Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
#5Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
how is Paul Ehrlich linked to the original post?
what is he wrong about?
Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
#6This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the social welfare state.
That depends very much on how technology progresses during coming decades. If we get something like AGI, then having less working age people may be a good thing, because there will be much, much less demand for white collar workers at least.
In the mid 2000's when I was a kid, at school I was taught that there would be a HUGE labour shortage once certain large generations retire, as younger generations are much smaller. Guess what, they retired a decade ago, and yet my country has the second highest unemployment rate in EU, with a very weak job market for fresh graduates in particular. Increased efficiency & automation ate all those jobs, nobody was hired to replace many of the boomers who retired. I doubt the future will be any different.
Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
#7The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
#8Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
how is Paul Ehrlich linked to the original post? what is he wrong about?
[deleted]
Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
#9The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
The thing that collapses in a negative population growth environment is passive earnings from interest and asset appreciation, retirement, and to some extent social welfare states. The whole idea of things like social security is predicated on a growing population paying for the elderly. It's also very, very bearish for things like real estate long term. We are probably still in a real estate bubble.
I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall about this since I was in my twenties.
I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like climate change and natural resource depletion.
Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
#10Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
how is Paul Ehrlich linked to the original post? what is he wrong about?
Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve completely to death with no aid). He believed that the sustainable population for the planet was one billion.
He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."