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The Population Bust

foreignaffairs.com

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Re: The Population Bust

#91

Post by dumbfoundded »

paulsutter wrote: post #87

This isn’t a problem, it’s just preparation for the next stage of evolution (AGI). Our task is nearly complete.

I often wonder what post AGI society will look like:

- Will we become pets?

- Will we become extinct?

- Will we absorb into the AGI?

Maybe the AGI will just disappear and leave human affairs to humans and with some residual presence to ensure we never create a second.

I think much more likely than real AGI, we create an "intelligent" computer virus that locks up all networked computing power.

Re: The Population Bust

#92

Post by ryacko »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #89

I'd recommend "The Accidental Superpower" - Peter Zeihan. To summarize, he views the world economy as entirely enabled by the US Navy. The protection and projection of this naval forced has allowed an unparalleled level of relatively free global trade. With the population bust, he predicts the US will turn inwards. The world economy will fragment. Less rigid economies will collapse. Global investment will all but dry…

I find it unlikely that piracy and government navies imposing tolls on shipping lanes will return without a US Navy. The Petrodollar is dependent on the US Navy, but that is it.

Very few militaries have modernized, until recently, if the Falklands War occurred again, the British and the Argentines would be largely using the same weapons and equipment (partly from deliveries of the F-35), the greatest pressure on tyrants is access to their Swiss bank accounts, or whatever many apartments they own through shell companies in New York or London.

Re: The Population Bust

#93

Post by AnthonyMouse »

toasterlovin wrote: post #27
esarbe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it is; the availability of pretty much perfect contraceptives negates that to a large degree. The use of contraceptives is cultural, not biological. So we'll hit a replacement problem long before natural selection has time to catch up. The replacement issue has already real implications, this will become much more obvious in the course of the next 30 years. Any relevant change on the population size the prope…

> Even if it is; the availability of pretty much perfect contraceptives negates that to a large degree. No it doesn’t. My wife an I both wanted to have large families, even when we were children. How will contraceptives affect people’s basic motivations and life goals? > Any relevant change on the population size the propensity for fertility can have; it will take (three, four, five , ...) generations to manifest. Fi…

> And anyway, we have a precedent for what happens when there is significant population reduction: the Black Death. Life got way better for the vast majority of people who survived that event.

The difference between the Black Death and a population decline driven by lower fertility rates is that the Black Death disproportionately claimed the lives of the old and the frail. The result of that (at terrible cost) was an increase in average productivity by removing the people who would otherwise have required assistance, along with a reduction in competition for scarce resources (like food).

A population decline driven by a reduction in the fertility rate effectively does the opposite -- you end up with more elderly people compared to the number of young working people. And we haven't had a meaningful scarcity of food in centuries, so the things that are scarce now are certain types of skilled labor (e.g. doctors), which you can only really source from young people because there aren't a lot of medical school applicants from the population of people 55 and older.

Re: The Population Bust

#94

Post by vmh1928 »

Capitalism is about the allocation of capital in society. The article tries to make the point that Capitalism depends on ever increasing markets and/or labor forces. Capitalism is a self-organizing system and will allocate capital for products and services wherever the individual participants decide is the best place for them to put their capital to work. If fewer babies are born and more 60+ exist then capital will flow to adult diapers instead of infant ones. Capital can be destroyed as well so it's not like we'll have toxic waste dumps of unused capital. A shrinking population is a change and an opportunity, it's not the end of the world.

Re: The Population Bust

#95

Post by dumbfoundded »

ryacko wrote: post #92
dumbfoundded wrote: post #89

I'd recommend "The Accidental Superpower" - Peter Zeihan. To summarize, he views the world economy as entirely enabled by the US Navy. The protection and projection of this naval forced has allowed an unparalleled level of relatively free global trade. With the population bust, he predicts the US will turn inwards. The world economy will fragment. Less rigid economies will collapse. Global investment will all but dry…

I find it unlikely that piracy and government navies imposing tolls on shipping lanes will return without a US Navy. The Petrodollar is dependent on the US Navy, but that is it. Very few militaries have modernized, until recently, if the Falklands War occurred again, the British and the Argentines would be largely using the same weapons and equipment (partly from deliveries of the F-35), the greatest pressure on tyra…

I think piracy is highly likely without a strong unified (not necessarily American) naval presence. It wouldn't be Somalian pirates. I'd guess it'd look more like the piracy of the 17th and 18th century where state-sponsored individuals create profit and havoc from interference with competing countries.

Shipping fragmentation also seems likely without a strong global navy. As you mention, the Petrodollar is dependent on the US Navy. The collapse or hampering of energy trade alone would launch the world into a great depression.

I'm not sure how you're trying to relate the modernization of militaries. From my understanding, the USA exports old versions of our military technology to many allies.

Re: The Population Bust

#96

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #66
triceratops wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity increases though, don't rely on population, and are the actual driver of economic growth. Growth due to population increase is the baseline rate and shouldn't count because people aren't more prosperous per-capita.

Productivity increases due to automation go to the owners of capital. Many individual’s productivity is not going up, therefore they are worth less.

> Productivity increases due to automation go to the owners of capital.

That is only true if there is a monopoly on automation, which there generally isn't. In which case the productivity increases go into lower prices, which result in greater demand for whatever is still scarce.

That can be capital owners (e.g. land), but it can also be skilled labor or literally anything else which is in demand and people choose to spend the money on that they had saved from the lower prices driven by automation.

Re: The Population Bust

#97

Post by toasterlovin »

philwelch wrote: post #58
toasterlovin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mechanism is that the propensity to have more children is partly genetic. So as people with those genes out-breed the rest of the population, those genes come to predominate in the population. Thus overcoming the demographic transition. Here is a recent paper that models this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... The Black Death is pretty well accepted as a contributor to the end of feu…

> The mechanism is that the propensity to have more children is partly genetic. So as people with those genes out-breed the rest of the population, those genes come to predominate in the population. Thus overcoming the demographic transition. Is this entirely a genetic thing or are there also cultural components? I’ve long entertained a crackpot theory that North America will be almost entirely Mormon or Roman Cathol…

The heritability of fertility is about 50%, I believe. So about half of the variance in number of offspring is genetic. The remainder is other stuff: culture, chance, etc. I would imagine that the genetic component is multi faceted. Some of it might be a desire to have children. Some of it might be a resistance to certain ideas or lifestyles that result in fewer offspring (if that seems far fetched, consider first that political orientation is also about 50% heritable).

Re: The Population Bust

#98

Post by toasterlovin »

elihu wrote: post #67
mrrrgn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the tendency to have large families is heritable in some measurable way, maybe because of beliefs or personality traits, wouldn't the carriers of whatever makes them have more babies eventually overtake the rest of the population? It may not be the case that this is how it will work, but it's not a foregone conclusion that "on average" most people will continue to not want to have kids even in the "first world." (…

That seems plausible. I think it's reasonable to suppose that people who grew up in large families might themselves prefer to have large families, but I also suspect that personal preferences like that aren't all that sticky across more than a few generations. Maybe it balances out. For now, we can just say that most people in well-off societies aren't opting to have large families and that doesn't appear likely to c…

> I also suspect that personal preferences like that aren't all that sticky across more than a few generations

There is pretty strong evidence that the variance in the number of offspring is about 50% genetic.

Re: The Population Bust

#99

Post by fiblye »

philwelch wrote: post #70
fiblye wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, to an extent. There’s a limit to what one person can buy or contribute to an economy. It’s easier to sell 2 TVs to two people than it is 2 TVs to one person.

Yeah but that one person can have 20 different streaming subscriptions for the TV, for example. Or they could have a really really awesome TV instead of a shitty one. Economic value is somewhat subjective; if people are willing to buy a billion dollars of hats for their video game avatar, that’s a billion dollars of economic activity.

They can. But there’s only so much TV they can sit down and watch until they start cancelling services they know they don’t use. Growth stops somewhere.

Re: The Population Bust

#100

Post by WalterBright »

_0ffh wrote: post #82
reidacdc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm missing something, the Gompertz function you refer to has an implicit model that the organism's population stabilizes because of Malthusian constraints, a lack of some kind of resource. But birth rates have been declining in first-world countries for a long time in the absence of this kind of constraint, and the Foreign Affairs article specifically notes that both Malthus and Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bom…

I think western population development has gone sustainable largely due to social advancements re women. Not all parts of the world have yet had that kind of progress, and are still happily multiplying in an unsustainable way. Unless we manage to export this kind of progress, I fear we will not be able to avoid all overpopulation issues. One problem is that costly (in loss of lives) regional wars over resources and t…

> the enslavement of women as a means of replenishment for your armies

What society has ever done that?

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