The Data Is Clear: People Are Having Less Sex

https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-data-is-clear-people-are-having

by paulpauper • 2 years ago

18 20 2 years ago

graphsaboutreligion.com

gerikson• 2 years ago

Well this will make the neo-puritans happier.

xpl6• 2 years ago

So as far as the progress goes, people are less and less interested in reproducing.

With fertility rates rapidly falling towards 0 all over the world, I see only three viable long-term options, if we want to self-preserve (and not just fade away):

1. Growing humans on industrial scale in bio-reactors. Government+AI would take care of raising them. Basically a cyber-communism. Probably could happen in China.

2. Replacing/surpassing humans with AI+robots completely. Then reproducing is as easy as scaling up a K8S cluster. Seems that we're heading towards it.

3. Reverting progress. Could happen anyway via some apocalypse scenario. But also could be deliberate, like Neo-Amish or something.

jameskilton• 2 years ago

Why does it have to always be the apocalypse? In the 90s people were freaking out about overpopulation and how society was eventually going to collapse. 20-30 years later the opposite is now happening.

Some things just take decades to change, and are always changing in one way or another.

xpl6• 2 years ago

Why does it have to always be the apocalypse?

It is just a likely thing to happen IMO. WW3 or extreme climate change... or a depopulation so severe that the infrastructure will slowly collapse, and nobody could ever fix it, because all the smart people who built and maintained it are retired or dead? Or maybe even all of those combined.

mcphage• 2 years ago

Option 4, get people interested in reproducing?

xpl6• 2 years ago

But how? They're more interested in how to survive in a housing crisis on a low wage, with their employment/career prospects fading away due to the rise of AI. And the modern attention-sucking entertainment doesn't help.

dwb3• 2 years ago

Do you have any particular evidence or qualifications that would help convince me that this could actually be an exhaustive list of options? What do you estimate their relative probability to be?

xpl6• 2 years ago

I'm not here to convince, I'm just having fun. Personally I'm betting on a climate-change apocalypse, as it seems that we're stupid enough to sleepwalk towards it until its too late. The least probable option is that we become smart and fix the society so people will once again be happy to reproduce — I haven't even included this one on the list.

tivert• 2 years ago

You're nuts.

1. Growing humans on industrial scale in bio-reactors. Government+AI would take care of raising them. Basically a cyber-communism. Probably could happen in China.

"Probably could happen in China." It's about 1000 times more likely China will just crank up the carrots and sticks until their reproduction rate recovers. Right now they're going with carrots and propaganda, but unlike the West, they don't have any qualms about sticks.

They could probably solve the problem (in the medium term) by kicking women out of the workforce (or implementing a low glass ceiling) along with heavy fines for childlessness.

Quit reading sci-fi.

2. Replacing/surpassing humans with AI+robots completely. Then reproducing is as easy as scaling up a K8S cluster. Seems that we're heading towards it.

That's just the fantasy of weirdo tech fetishists (who are in disproportionately great supply in SV and on HN). Not going to happen unless some psycho billionaire manages to build a robot army.

Quit reading sci-fi.

3. Reverting progress. Could happen anyway via some apocalypse scenario. But also could be deliberate, like Neo-Amish or something.

"Progress" is a myth. There's no direction to history. Even if current social trends continue, at least with sub-replacement reproduction, there will be selection against them and an inflection point after which things start to go in a different direction, though perhaps it will take a couple hundred years to get there.

Quit reading sci-fi.

xpl6• 2 years ago

Not going to happen unless some psycho billionaire manages to build a robot army.

It isn't about a robot revolt. It is about slowly pushing humans out of economy, until we're not economic actors anymore, because we're uncompetitive. Combined with rapid depopulation, many generations after, there will be no carbon based economy anymore. Everything will be owned and driven by silicon-based profit-seeking self-improving autonomous entities, rapidly expanding all over in space at a significant fraction of speed of light (the "grabby alien" thing). It might happen very gradually, over many decades (or even centuries). But why wouldn't it?

Yeah, I might need to quit reading sci-fi. But many of our sci-fi predictions became reality recently.

agar• 2 years ago

It's interesting how an analysis like this becomes a crucible for one's own preconceptions and biases.

Anti-porn? It's because of the porn

Anti-LGBTQ? It's because it's hard to have sex "when you're not even sure of the gender" of your partner (an actual comment on the Substack)

Parent? It's because less available childcare and more helicopter parenting expectations lead to less alone time

Young adult? It's nihilism about the future and crushing workloads with no way to afford your own home/apartment

Old? It's because people had more sex when "men were men and women were women"

An incel? It's because of women

Feminist? It's because of men

Anti-tech? It's social media

Environmentalist? It's environmental factors

I could go on. But almost anyone could argue for almost any reason, and it seems to be more enlightening about the person making the argument than about the problem.

TheLoafOfBread• 2 years ago

An incel? It's because of women
Feminist? It's because of men

I find it funny that you indirectly equated feminists and incels

mschuster91• 2 years ago

How about (especially young) people literally not being able to afford more than a fucking shack with roommates? Or having to work two jobs to barely make rent? Having sex requires privacy and energy after all.

Landlords and fundamentally broken housing markets are the problem, everywhere. But people rather blame "the smartphones!!!", JFC.

jonfromsf• 2 years ago

Most people have better sex lives when they are young, poor, and living in shared housing situations.

ProxCoques• 2 years ago

"People" here means Californians aged 18-30. A similar survey in France or the Netherlands (even the UK I would think) might be rather different.

snowpid• 2 years ago

Yes, this is typical usdefaultism.

stephc_int13• 2 years ago

Having less sex is certainly a bit sad, as without enough experience doing it, most people will never do it properly enough to truly enjoy it.

But I don't think that should alarm anyone, this is not the source of the fertility drop, our species does not not a very high sexual activity to trigger reproduction.

And by the way, I don't think that any kind of population collapse is on the horizon, we'll certainly experience a population stagnation, maybe a slight to moderate reduction at some point, but what we're about to see is the flatter part of the sigmoid, and this should be considered good news.

The Data Is Clear: People Are Having Less Sex

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