851–860 of 1001 posts
I'm always surprised this topic comes up all the time and there's all sorts of navel gazing about economics and housing and other reasons people want to have fewer kids. It seems to me that the simplest and most likely explanation is: Having kids was never a primary motivation. Having sex was. Kids were just a hard-to-avoid downstream consequence of that. Once you have the pill, which makes it much easier to have sex…
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Populations do not tend to grow to equilibrium and then stop. They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse. The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it. A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev... . It walks through a variety of past examples of human soci…
> They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse. That's not what's happening here. Birth rates are below 2.1 in many countries who are no where close to "outstripping their resources". There are other factors causing the contraction which have nothing to do with resource limitations. In fact it seems like it's the opposite: richer nations with more resources tend to have lower birth r…
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I think you’re missing the point, you’re assuming this brief moment will stop. Why would population stop declining?
sex feels good and you need a certain minimum amount of civilization to manufacture condoms
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a large organism (human populaton on earth) reaching equilibrium and ceasing to grow does not equal to human extinction... it far more likely is just a temporary contraction that will then reverse when the conditions are set for it.
The population is not "reaching equilibrium", it's shrinking. If it was reaching equilibrium you'd expect the births per women to be slowly reducing until it approaches 2.1 and then staying there. It's dropping substantially below that. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the contraction is temporary, the causal factors seem largely unrelated to the existing population size.
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Humans are the second most populous animal on the planet. We are in no danger of extinction.
I don't know where you got that idea, but we're not even the most populous species of vertebrates on the planet (that might be chickens). If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.
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I was home alone, it was fine. What do you mean by "kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised"?
Depending on where you live, police will be called.
What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.
Our entire social contract relies on the a redistribution of wealth from young to old. Boomer Communism, it's currently called. If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements. If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossi…
What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.
>What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out…
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>What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out…
> Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve. At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no? Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society, kids suddenly have value again. So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium or the population keeps swinging up and down. Total extinction seems unlikely.
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This is really the message of Abundance . If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy o…
No disrespect, but historical evidence does not support this argument. I've seen similar claims made in other threads. Fertility rates have been decreasing (multiple factors) since 1850, even while general prosperity has been increasing. There is a connection between economic uncertainty and marriage/families over the short run. But the most likely causes of declining birth rates are cultural: modernization, freedom,…