Forget About Overpopulation, Soon There Will Be Too Few Humans

https://quillette.com/2023/11/07/forget-about-overpopulation-soon-there-will-be-too-few-humans/

by jseliger • 3 years ago

23 27 3 years ago

People in first world countries are not magically less fertile than those elsewhere, but the conditions for raising children certainly are. Politicians would do well to examine what the major blockers from people having more kids are and work to alleviate them for the good of their own country.

tuatoru• 3 years ago

The major blocker seems to be rising credentialism. People could start careers with just high school two generations ago; now at least a four-year degree and often a post-graduate qualifications seems to be required.

Women are fertile from 18 (legally) to about 40, realistically. (After 40 the risk of bad outcomes go up a lot and the chances of conception go down a lot.)

If the first decade of that period to age 28 is occupied with getting qualifications, and the next seven years with establishing a career, then only about five years are left. In five years a couple in their thirties could expect to have two children if they are lucky.

strangattractor4• 3 years ago

Maybe one of the reasons people are not having kids is that it has gotten too difficult and expensive to raise them. Probably because there are too many people. Expensive housing, energy, food, transportation are mostly due to the large numbers of people vying for those resources. The resources don't care that majority of them are older and becoming less productive. There are not to few humans - only too few young humans to support the large number of older ones.

There was a time when a single income could support a middle class family. That is simply no longer the case for most people in urban situations. Now if you are Elon Musk and do not intend to actually care for those children yourself and can afford alternatives 11 seems to be the limit so far or 12 for Nick Canon. I eagerly await the X child;)

NoMoreNicksLeft7• 3 years ago

Maybe one of the reasons people are not having kids is that it has gotten too difficult and expensive to raise them.

An interesting theory, but it is an indisputable fact that somewhere else, someone's raising not just one child, but many, on income you'd call pocket change.

Countries that attempt to provide financial incentives quickly discover that these incentives don't seem to cause fertility rates to budge. While even I freely admit that there must be some number at which you could convince the childless to have a baby and raise it, that number's large enough that no government could hope to afford incentivizing children.

There was a time when a single income could support a middle class family.

Sure. But when you look at the square footage for those homes... many of them are still standing, after all, pick any year you like back in the 1950s or whatever, you see they're all crackerboxes. 1100sqft. That's what the family of four lived in. Depending on the era, their big electronics purchase was the 13" black and white tv. How many nights a month do you eat out, really? How many days do you end up eating out, twice, lunch and dinner? Did those people back in the 1950s eat out once a month, and it was a big deal for them?

I don't think you'd like their "single income could support a middle class family" lifestyle. I don't think anyone here would be comfortable with that.

candiodari• 3 years ago

I don't think you'd like their "single income could support a middle class family" lifestyle. I don't think anyone here would be comfortable with that.

If only there had been 50 years of progress since then ...

jayski• 3 years ago

but it is an indisputable fact that somewhere else, someone's raising not just one child, but many, on income you'd call pocket change.

This is true, but there's also been 50 years of not progress, but a concentrated effort to turn us all into hyper-consumerists.

Media, government, corporations, have prioritized growth for decades. Predictably we now have a population that cares more about buying disposable trinkets than having a family. Ironically, declining population is now hurting economic growth.

strangattractor4• 3 years ago

Few facts concerning people are indisputable.

I don't think you can convince people to have children. They either want to or they do not want to. The people that are inclined to want children have a decision to make before they do. This is a long term project and involves the well being of others - not yourself. Most people take that seriously. They want a situation where they can be successful for 18 yrs or more. 18 years of steady income and medical care. 18 years of a place to live and 18 years of help from another individual that you depend on. If you do not have a large enough income failure of any one or more of those things is much more likely and hard to recover from.

I am not advocating a return to the 50s. Nor am advocating any lifestyle solution. It is my OPINION the article is in some ways wrong or incorrect about what the problem is.

NoMoreNicksLeft7• 3 years ago

By the time most people can be convinced that this is the case, it will be too late... it might be some sort of intellectual victory to realize you should have had children when you're 50, but biology has already made everything final.

There exists this strange phenomenon, where seemingly intelligent people insist that, somehow, in the future, little girls will grow up again all wanting to become mommies and have 2.1 (or more!) children, then those little girls will have, by definition, grown up in a world where all the adults around them including but not limited to their parents have no children or have only one child.

Why would such a little girl buck that trend? And it's not just one little girl who needs to do this, on average they all have to have 2.1, or else a smaller fraction has to have an even higher number.

A civilization/society that can't be bothered to replace itself by raising children has already demonstrated its unworthiness. Maybe it should die.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

There are 8 billion people in the work, on track to 9-10 billion by end of century. Around 6 million children under 15 die per year. That’s around 16,000 deaths every day, or 11 every minute. [1] The International Labour Organisation states in its latest World Report on Child Labour (2013) that there are around 265 million working children in the world—almost 17 per cent of the worldwide child population. [2] An estimated 333 million children live in extreme poverty. [3] I could go on, but a wall of text comment provides little marginal value.

High level, the world should take care of the people already here before whining and hand wringing over a reduction in total aggregate population and a declining population trajectory.

A civilization/society that can't be bothered to replace itself by raising children has already demonstrated its unworthiness. Maybe it should die.

We're unworthy because of how we treat humans here today, arguably. Treat existing humans better before complaining more aren't being produced.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/child-labor

[3] https://www.unicef.org/social-policy/child-poverty

NoMoreNicksLeft7• 3 years ago

High level, the world should take care of the people already here

There is no "world". There are 200-some nation-states. Each sovereign, laws unto themselves.

I agree that each of these should take care of their own. In my nation-state, 11 children per minute aren't dying. I have no say in how other nation-states do it, and no advice they would listen to. I'll stay out of their business.

Will their lots improve, do you think, when modern civilization starts to collapse, because the only people who know how to run the pharmaceutical plants are geriatric? When they lose their minds due to senility, when they die?

You're worried about the wrong things, letting your feelings guide you instead of your reason.

We won't reach 10 billion. It's doubtful we'll reach 9. There will come a day when Japanese, Korean, and Italian are dead languages. Shit's real.

We're unworthy because of how we treat humans here today, arguably.

I'm worthy. My wife's worthy. My children are worthy. Don't speak for me. I'm not a part of your "we". I don't feel guilt for actions not my own, for things that happened before I was born, for circumstances outside of my control. I don't know why you could feel guilt like that. Is it some sort of posturing? A young man might do it if he thought young woman were attracted to that. Are you young? Are women your age attracted to it?

If they are, do any of them seem like good prospects for marriage?

rindalir2• 3 years ago

I'm one of those people who often says "the problem is that there are just too many people." But I hadn't ever really thought about the hypothesis that the "good idea" yield was low enough that you needed a large number of brains to make technological (or other) progress. Certainly there are lots of problems in the near, medium-term, and distant future that will require creative solutions.

NoMoreNicksLeft7• 3 years ago

It's more than that. Yes, if you only have one genius per million people, you want more millions so you can get more geniuses.

But it's also true that there is a networking effect going on. Having two geniuses is more than twice as good as having only one. They work together, they're smarter together.

If we could travel the universe Star Trek style, what we would almost certainly discover is that for any given level of technology, it's correlated to a particular population level. The science fiction stuff we all love to watch and read about and dream of, that stuff's available if you hit 20 billion, 30 billion. We should want that many humans to exist.

The trick is figuring out where to put them (populate the solar system).

The inverse of this problem is that as population levels off and starts to fall, technological advance will stagnate and stall out completely. But there will probably be even worse catastrophes such that it will go unnoticed.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 3 years ago

if you only have one genius per million people, you want more millions so you can get more geniuses.

It takes more than the genius to exist, they have to be in an environment where they can thrive for there to doing anything beneficial. Also, there can also be evil genius people too, who seek only personal gratification at the expense of everyone else.

as population levels off and starts to fall, technological advance will stagnate and stall out completely.

Citation needed. There is no reason to think this would be the case.

rindalir2• 3 years ago

Right, network effects -- benefits accrue as power of population size. That's a good point.

And the stagnation is a depressing thought. I naively hope that if we can survive this phase of our existence we will find a way to exist in large numbers but also allow all the other beings along for the ride with us to exist and thrive as well. But to survive that long and figure all this out, we actually need to increase our numbers and demographic trends look pretty pessimistic for that.

jyounker• 3 years ago

Readers should be aware that The Quillette has been known to produce things which are strictly propaganda, and to take what they write with a significant grain of salt.

An example would be their description of the Cider Riot confrontation in Portland. They presented this event in an apparently impartial way, when in fact it was an organized assault instigated by the right wing agitators, and the Quillette's reporter (Andy Ngo) was part of the assault.

yetanother123452• 3 years ago

The article is by an author named "Maarten Boudry". Not "Andy Ngo". It is about demographics worldwide, not specific to Portland. It does not even mention the words "riot", "confrontation", or "Portland"... did you even read it?

It's actually a quite good article, and it does not contain any traces of either left-wing or right-wing "propaganda" AFAIK & IMHO.

YMMV, but this thread is about one specific article that is not what you are referring to. Criticizing one (unread?) article based on perceived faults of one other completely unrelated article -- and without mentioning even the slightest content from the article in question -- does not seem like a logical thing to do.

jsaintmything• 3 years ago

There is also the raising fertility problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLxFazLK2Mg

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

This is panglossian nonsense.

More people may, in the magical thinking of Diversity Über Alles, find more solutions (just don't expect it out of the Baltimore MD USA public school pupils).

However, it is not magical to believe that more people cause more problems once "me/us first" ethics dominate since we can see that in many multi-cultural slums already.

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

I suppose I'll be the turd in the punchbowl as is my frequent role though I'm not exactly happy about it either. We live in a collapsing country on a dying planet, and it's quickly becoming clear that we will not be turning either of those around. We have however succeeded in killing god, so we now know that we will not be going to some good place when we die. There is no meaning to any of this. I'm not surprised that population is in decline; I'm surprised that people still have children at all. But I do now understand why religion is so correlated with birthrate.

yetanother123452• 3 years ago

Came here to recommend the article, but see it is now flagged? Why?

The article is well written, thought provoking, fact-based, filled with links, and may inspire a lot of different discussion.

I see one (1!) comment below claiming that the organ that the article appears in may on one other occasion have misrepresented some event that is in no way related to the current article, so I really do not see the relevance of that.

This article is clearly worth a read, and presents no information at all that needs to be flagged, IMHO.

nojvek2• 3 years ago

Well likely plateau at population of ~10B.

We have finite livable land on this planet. As we all consume more resources and energy per capita, live longer, there’s only so many humans we can sustain.

The 1900s looked like exponential, but any finite system ends up as an S curve.

We’re at an S curve.

There’ll never be too few humans unless an asteroid hit , nuclear Armageddon or a virus wiping out large parts of humanity.

What’s happening now is most population centers are finding their balance of population they want to sustain.

nojvek2• 3 years ago

Older societies are less dynamic, more resistant to change, and less creative. Most scientists and inventors achieve their breakthroughs in their twenties and thirties, so fewer young people means fewer good ideas (and more older and infirm people to be supported by those fewer ideas). Until we design AI systems that can completely take over our scientific labours, the only genuine engine of progress on this planet is the kilogram of grey matter inside our skull. And with fewer and fewer fresh brains to produce and exchange ideas, the engine of human progress could soon be grinding to a halt (although the world still has huge reserves of underutilised brainpower in poor countries today)

This was a good read and argument, although next 10-20 years may tell how important grey goo in skull still remains.

Forget About Overpopulation, Soon There Will Be Too Few Humans

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