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Are We Doomed?

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Re: Are We Doomed?

#11

Post by rekabis »

The one thing many people miss - or utterly fail to acknowledge - is how the entire edifice of capitalism is violently against any attempt to reverse fossil fuels, simply because it is far too profitable to turn away from. And when you realize that the only responsibility corporations have is to their shareholders, it makes perfect sense.

It’s why CO2e levels continue to accelerate, why heating has similarly accelerated such that we might see more heating in the next 10 than we have in the last 75, and why we are still on the absolute worst-case-path-possible, all because of “business as usual” being too profitable to ignore.

We’re fucked, not because we aren’t doing anything, but because those who can are the 1% who aren’t, and those who actually want to do something are the 99% who have absolutely no power to affect the former.

Re: Are We Doomed?

#12

Post by fleroviumna »

txrx0000 wrote: post #5

Natural selection has been strongly optimizing for pro-natal genes and cultures since the introduction of the birth control pill. The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.

[dead]

Re: Are We Doomed?

#13

Post by recursivecaveat »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

>Does that mean we are doomed to die out? Henry Gee thinks so, if only because all species die out in the end. The question is simply how long it takes. Why isn’t this the default position? The most firmly predictable position is that every biological species will go away eventually. Even humans are vastly different chimeral species from the proto-humans that made up modern anatomical human. Most europeans have signi…

If we're going by "all species die out in the end" then anything we transition to will die too: entropy will get the whole universe in the end. Past that there's nothing that says any species can't expand out, settle whatever planets they want and stick around to the end. I'm also pretty cool with my millions-of-years-from-now descendants looking back at me and thinking about how different they are from me. I would consider it an incredible success to go that long without catastrophically destroying ourselves.

Re: Are We Doomed?

#14

Post by palmotea »

txrx0000 wrote: post #5

Natural selection has been strongly optimizing for pro-natal genes and cultures since the introduction of the birth control pill. The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.

> Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time.

They are "plummeting around the world at the same time," they just didn't start plummeting everywhere at the same time.

> The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.

Except Africa can't fill the gap for everywhere else, and if immigration is the "solution" then what do you do about Africa after it's been sucked dry of its prime labor force? Just leave all its poor elderly to die on their own?

Re: Are We Doomed?

#15

Post by palmotea »

yanhangyhy wrote: post #7

Human history is full of this ridiculous hand-wringing over nothing. some people don't actually do shit, just sit around pointing fingers and nitpicking. They skip the real work of digging into social change and fixate on surface-level bullshit. The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over…

> But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better.

Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism (including capitalism-inflected feminism that idealizes careers, which is pretty much all mainstream feminism).

Under the current system you exist to be maximally exploited to increase profits (ideally consuming all your capacity, including that which you'd use to reproduce and raise children), and childcare (socialized or no) is a foolish attempt to solve that problem with more of the problem (and of course that doesn't actually work).

The solution is a system the allocates a significant fraction of everyone's labor to cultural continuity (reproduction, child-rearing, and civic engagement), which would require a significant re-ordering of priorities.

Re: Are We Doomed?

#16

Post by ta12653421 »

yanhangyhy wrote: post #7

Human history is full of this ridiculous hand-wringing over nothing. some people don't actually do shit, just sit around pointing fingers and nitpicking. They skip the real work of digging into social change and fixate on surface-level bullshit. The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over…

For a lot of woman in "somehow develoed countries" the labour market is today more attractive than the "marriage market" as women rights etc. give them much more freedom than it was in older days (e.g. in some EU countries the woman had to ask their spouse if they allow them to work up into the 70s).

If you are for women rights etc., then you have to accept that this includes much lower birth rates (as having childrend is not the only way to survive).

Birth rates are only up in countries without any social development of women rights.

Re: Are We Doomed?

#17

Post by ta12653421 »

jameskilton wrote: post #4

Betteridge's Law of Headlines: No. I remember the freak-out of the 90s. The world was going to be at 10 billion humans and unsustainable, leading to world-wide famine. Now we're at the other end. It will cycle, the human race will continue.

No, it wont: Population statistics are among the most robust & stable one and one with the most accurate data that we have across the globe. Populatoin statistics are running reaaaallly slow - on that one day when you see the decrease in the graph, it is already too late.

Re: Are We Doomed?

#18

Post by inglor_cz »

palmotea wrote: post #15
yanhangyhy wrote: post #7

Human history is full of this ridiculous hand-wringing over nothing. some people don't actually do shit, just sit around pointing fingers and nitpicking. They skip the real work of digging into social change and fixate on surface-level bullshit. The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over…

> But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better. Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism…

Beware of explaining everything with one reason, and I certainly noticed the tendency of contemporary Americans to explain everything with "capitalism".

It doesn't really fit the picture. Capitalism is about 250 years old and most of that time it correlated with a massive population explosion, not a collapse. The current world also isn't uniformly capitalist. Socioeconomic conditions and systems differ across the globe, but the collapse seems to be nearly universal.

There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school and we mostly eliminated teenage pregnancies in the developed world. Which is likely better for the socioeconomic level of the now-not-mothers, but it also has negative biological effects and sank the overall birth rate in a non-trivial way.

What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy. That is a very small subset of "capitalism", though.

Re: Are We Doomed?

#19

Post by lIl-IIIl »

ta12653421 wrote: post #17
jameskilton wrote: post #4

Betteridge's Law of Headlines: No. I remember the freak-out of the 90s. The world was going to be at 10 billion humans and unsustainable, leading to world-wide famine. Now we're at the other end. It will cycle, the human race will continue.

No, it wont: Population statistics are among the most robust & stable one and one with the most accurate data that we have across the globe. Populatoin statistics are running reaaaallly slow - on that one day when you see the decrease in the graph, it is already too late.

Demographers can predict when people are going to die but they have no way to predict how many children they will have.

They have been getting it wrong for a long time, assuming that the gradual decrease in birthrate will stop, only to be proven wrong.

They can't just extrapolate assuming that birth rates will keep dropping since that would reduce the birthrate to 0. So they do the next best thing and assume it will stay constant.

But in reality, we just don't know which way it will go.

Re: Are We Doomed?

#20

Post by hakFoo101 »

yanhangyhy wrote: post #7

Human history is full of this ridiculous hand-wringing over nothing. some people don't actually do shit, just sit around pointing fingers and nitpicking. They skip the real work of digging into social change and fixate on surface-level bullshit. The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over…

your suggestion of "socialize childcare big-time" is tried in EU, countries like sweden offers the best support of families and yet are parley getting the numbers up without immigration, the root of the drop is the change of women role in society, finding a political sweet spot is required, if women get a salary from the government when they have more than 3 kids then it might encourage families to take the big step and the women to spend more time doing the real full time job of home care, also families needs help with bigger housing, logistics and home duties when they have more kids, normally that help came from the grandparents but it's not happening anymore because the average age of the grandparents is higher, and baby boomers and "older generations" are assholes by blocking the housing options for their kids, i can also suggest that a adults with no kids can get some money by hour from the government for helping families with many kids as it is also needed sometimes.

solve this: - Housing issues. - Income issues. - Care and time issues.

It's really alarming when governments see their society collapsing and do nothing, if you have such government, remove it, it's a stupid government.

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