No one has any money for rent, food, or living expenses.
Everyone is overworked.
We’re paid pennies compared to CEO’s.
Every single company fucks us by raising prices because they can, and our governments do nothing because they haven’t worked for the people in decades…
While that is all generally true, the status of most people in developed countries today is better than its ever been in history.
That’s what’s driving fertility down. People who have access to education, medical care, relative comfort and security have fewer children.
My wife and I are part of a younger generation whose culture revolves around NOT having children until all those things you mentioned are attained. The stress of even having a kid, let alone multiple, is not something we’re going to address until we hit financial security.
The subtext there is that you feel that financial security is something which is attainable.
Pretty sure throughout history most (if not all) generations have worked to give their kids a better (if not approximately equal) quality of life to their own. That isn’t feasible for many people, and older generations are frustrated that it wasn’t/isn’t feasible for many who are currently young adults. That, along with the ability to control if you have kids, makes the choice for many of us. Why would you choose to have kids if their lives are worse than your own and you don’t enjoy your own?
This is in the good economies too! In most of Africa life is even shittier. I can only imagine. Well, is still mostly better than it’s ever been. History is cruel, and present but at least % of population living decent is much higher globally. Still, USA richest country in the world and we can’t Even get universal healthcare, and instead of aiding homeless domestically, or money for food abroad etc… We give a genocidal maniac hundreds of billions to play with.
And yet you do nothing but complain on the internet.
If you really had no options you’d be desperate enough to kill your boss or his boss or the CEO.
Ah yes the ol 'you’re not murdering people so none of your problems are valid". I have a cross-stitch of that in the living room
Do you have an Etsy?
What 😂
I’m all for “eat the rich”, but my boss doesn’t make much more than me
I really like my boss. He is a happy, older, Santa Claus looking dude that buys us a real lunch on the day we have to come in. Always makes sure we have everything we need.
He sounds amazing! I’m happy you have him as a boss
I am as well. I didn’t know what to make of him because he didn’t say a lot in the interviews (it was a panel style set up) and was worried he would be a hard ass.
Nope, nicest boss I ever had. “Just do your work and ask questions before you get behind, and if you get behind say something before it’s bad.”
Yeah, why fight for a better life when you can get put away for life for murder?
I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to have kids in this environment.
Not only that, but with the increasingly credible threat of automation looming, I don’t think we should be looking to traditional economic wisdom for advice about labor shortages.
If we run out of resources, the rich will taste good.
Cringe af. Can you please stop with the constant violent rhetoric? This does not solve any problems and instead divides humanity. You will not create a better future by killing more people.
History repeats itself. Unless laws change to reign in the 1% and the billionair class, heads will guaranteeably roll…the question is whether it’s sooner or later. It just comes down to a question of how much are people willing to put up with before someone takes matters into their own hands, and that will be the catalyst that causes change. Either others will follow suit, or the laws will get passed to control these people.
We’d have a better present right now if we guillotined rich fucks and their bootlickers.
Don’t kid yourself Richard, If Zuckerberg ever got the chance he’d eat you and everyone you care about!
But seriously, you worry about a divided humanity? We’ve been divided for centuries, and the people at the top aren’t going to willingly step down from their mountain of corpses to slum it with the rest of us.
It requires killing a lot fewer people than the .01% kills every day through economic violence. They’re just a walking trolley problem at this point.
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All rights are won through violence.
Totally agree. Instead of trying to create understanding, violence and thinking of other people as non-human only tears people apart.
Automation considered a threat is sad. What fucked up world we live in.
It has to be deprivatised if it’s going to be a positive for humanity, otherwise it’s just another upward wealth transfer.
Yep. Basically we already have answer to question “what if we had replicator?” and it is “DMCA”. Technology is not enough for society to be better.
Our modern rich think that with enough technology they can insulate themselves from our power entirely. The way I see it we either prove them wrong, or die.
Dont forget climate uncertainty
Yes, my wife and I considered not for environmental reasons. My parents thought we were nuts citing the threat of nuclear war when they were kids and everyone continuing to have kids then. They’ve come around to understand our hesitation now, mostly, but it was distressing that they couldn’t understand , if not agree, with hesitating.
Of course, the environment is just one thing that gives us pause these days. People are crazy. Politicians and the laws they create are (or the dissolution of certain laws is) crazy. Plenty of reasons to pause.
We did have a child, and I do not regret it, but we also have the means to support her and a way to escape the U.S. if things get much worse. Many Americans don’t have either option, and no child should be neglected or abused and every child should have a robust support system. I wish we would encourage and educate people on contraception on a grand scale.
My wife travels a lot for work, and I dabbled in genealogy years ago to track down my own birth relatives. By combining the two, my wife and our daughter now have EU passports, and I’m eligible for a long-term visa.
Theoretically I could be eligible for Slovakian citizenship (which is not their EU country) based on my own DNA ties, but that would require some mental gymnastics and a very progressive interpretation of how closed infant adoption affects legal rights.
I am actually very fond of Texas, and I think the idea of it is worth fighting for, and that there’s a strain of tolerance and hospitality and diversity here that could be compatible with a much more progressive worldview. I have hope that it can be better than it is. I think any place with people who love it is worth trying to make into the best version of itself, to say nothing of the people who couldn’t leave even if they wanted to…
but we’re also not going to be the last ones out if we lose that hope.
Hmmm, what dna tiws do you need to be eligible for Slovakian citizenship?
You need a grand-grandparent (or more recent) born in Slovakia. My biological great grandmother was born in a small town in the eastern half of what is now Slovakia, and immigrated to the US in the late 1920s. I was adopted as an infant though, so my legal family has no such connections, and while I could try to make my case, it would be both circumstantial and rather technical unless I could get help from my birth father, which is, shall we say, unlikely.
Interesting. My grandmother was.
I’ve wondered what my options to get to the EU are if I really wanted. That…is interesting.
Edit: do you have a source by any chance? So far I only see rules allowing if parents were Slovakian citizens.
The Australian embassy seems to have updated their page more recently than the US or Canada, and they mention the grandparents and great grandparents thing. I’d check with the US embassy (assuming you’re in the US) to confirm, but it looks like the long-discussed law change did happen. I kinda lost interest when I realized the doors I’d have to barge in to have a plausible chance of success. YMMV. :-)
Yes, the same here. We had 2 kids (and then a vasectomy). We’re not rich, but we do have a house we could sell to aid leaving, and we have enough in savings to make it without selling the house, if we needed to leave right away. Of course, environmental issues will be a global problem, but the response to those will likely be better in some places as compared to others.
And you only need to escape Indiana.
Not if Trump is president. My daughter is queer, she and I are both Jewish, and my wife is a librarian. They either want us to be part of their genocide or, in my wife’s case, in prison.
I have dual citizenship with the UK and also theoretically German citizenship. And I am sure as hell going to take advantage of that depending on what happens in November. I don’t even care about me, I care about my daughter.
Well, as I’ve said before, Illinois is close, and probably easier to get to on short notice if necessary. I’m a ways north of you (in IL), but my home is available to you if you find yourself in danger.
Edit: And you’d be coming this way anyway to fly overseas out of O’Hare, right?
Honestly, I’d probably drive somewhere less prominent and fly out from there. No reason to attract attention if you’re fleeing. But I appreciate the offer.
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That’s really awesome of him! I don’t care whether it was being friendly or officially announcing it. Either way, that’s amazing!
Replacement level for whom? To sustain the current population? Population growth? Status quo? Corporations?
Not sure any of these things are needed to be sustained at the levels we are currently at.
Someone please explain the detrimental repercussions of not having an equal to or greater than replacement level.
sure, i’ll try to explain briefly
“infrastructure”, i.e utilities, transport, bureacracy etc is built to support a fixed population within a city. when the population increases, you have to build more infrastructure to support this new population. this part is easy, you expand your cities at their edges, extend the utilities, and set up satellite bureacracy offices if needed
the tricky part is when you lose population. the correct move would be to demolish this infrastructure and scale back. trouble is, not only would this be wasteful, but it would also leave gaps in cities, since population decline doesn’t happen uniformly from a city edge. where exactly, do you demolish the infrastructure?
it would be nice if we live in a theoretical world where, as population decreases, the cities magically shrink at their edges, and suburban residents move closer in to fill the gaps. this is not how populations deplete from an area though (example: detroit, 1950 - 2020)
you will struggle to convince a suburban homeowner at the edge, to sell up and move to one of the gaps left behind by population loss. if we stop short of rewriting laws to force this population transfer, the end result is that you are left with a “swiss cheese” city. houses and settlements will be spread so thinly that becomes impossible for city goverments to provide “infrastructure” without providing it at a loss. your local goverment will then take debt and bankrupt, the infrastructure will collapse through lack of maintenance, and then the remaining population suffers big time
i want to note that i am not using this as an argument to support population growth. i am only stating the big, big problem that needs to be tackled somehow, concerning population loss. some big-brains are going to have to work this problem through, fast!
side note: interestingly, most NA cities are spread out and sprawled so much that they are suffering unaffordable infrastructure bills already, despite not suffering the effects of population loss. goodness knows how these places will fare when population loss actually hits…
This is one problem, but there’s a much bigger problem: the ratio of elderly (retired) to workers will increase substantially. Unless there is some AI productivity boost, many young people will have to work in health care/elderly care and standards of living will deteriorate A LOT.
houses and settlements will be spread so thinly that becomes impossible for city goverments to provide “infrastructure” without providing it at a loss
That’s been proven wrong by history. Population density was far lower 150 years ago and there was no problem with infrastructure despite everyone being more spread out before urbanization. Really spread out requires even less infrastructure today. Everyone in my neighborhood is on 3+ acres so water is from self maintained wells (private paid to install and replace every 20 years) and many have solar.
Heh infrastructure from 150 years ago is vastly different than infrastructure today. 150 years ago you didn’t have buried electricity lines, telecom lines and fiber, robust water and sewage solutions. Those things need regular service and replacement. If your population goes down that means your revenue to pay for those things go down as well.
In the modern world the only thing that’s needed for a rural home is fiber and a road. Solar provides power. Well and septic are cheaper than city water/sewer. If people have their own land, they don’t have to get food shipped from hundreds of miles away. More is grown locally.
i do get where you’re coming from, population density was less than it was. as a consequence, people had less access to resources. i would argue as a result of this, they also had less quality of life. the reason that urbanization has been a trend over the past 150 years that shows no sign of stopping, is because population urbanization is a multiplier on the effectiveness of quality of life, because it makes the cost to maintain higher quality of life cheaper per unit of life.1
for example, yes, you can supply a neighbourhood with individual wells, granted. but surely it would be cheaper for your community to build one massive well, and then everyone in the neighbourhood can collect the water at the well? the community could all pay their share to maintain the well, and then the per unit cost of the well would be cheaper to build and maintain.
whilst you’re at it, since there’s only one well, you can put in a really fancy pump and purifier system. a really high quality rig, with low cost to run. that way, you only need to maintain 1 efficient pump and purifier, rather than 20 or 30 less efficient ones that would cost more fuel to run as an aggregate. the unit cost per person of the pump and purifier setup would be cheaper to run and maintain.
if you wanna go really bougie, you could all chip in to collectively install pipes to every house so that your local community doesn’t have to walk to the well. if you build slightly more pipes than you need, this would act as insurance so that if one pipe breaks, you don’t all lose supply, and the water could flow round… other pipes… and… …wait this just sounds like a municipal supply but with extra steps…
i know i’m being facetious, but the reality is that it is just not measurably cheaper to live out in isolated pockets, through supplying individual infrastructure on a per person basis.2 economies of scale dictates this relationship.3 it’s inescapable.4. it’s inevitable.5 by all means, if it’s the only option someone has to provide utilities for themself, they should use it. but let’s not pretend that it’s more expensive to group up, live closer, and share the cost burden through communal resources.
i will trust you are aware of “economies of scale”, but i have linked a video here for those who are not aware, and also don’t want to read papers like a total nerd. ☝️🤓
[1]. (??? what would the units for quality of life per capita be i wonder? joy/kg? lol)
[2]. “The results indicate that cost savings can be achieved by increases in the scale of production…”, from “Productivity growth, economies of scale and scope in the water and sewerage industry: The Chilean case”, by Molinos-Senante and Maziotis, accessible at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8162666/
[3]. “…more spread out settlement (“Dispersion”) leads to diseconomies in distribution…”, from “Economies of scale, distribution costs and density effects in urban water supply: a spatial analysis of the role of infrastructure in urban agglomeration”, by Hugh B., accessible at https://etheses.lse.ac.uk/285/
[4]. “…agglomeration economies make firms and workers more productive in dense urban environments than in other locations.”, from “The economics of urban density”, by Duranton and Pupa, accssible at https://diegopuga.org/research.html#density
[5]. “Econometric analysis of the data from the Big Mac price survey revealed a significant positive effect of being in a rural area on the increase in prices.”, from “Identifying the size and geographic scope of short-term rural cost-of-living increases in the United States”, by Díaz-Dapena, Loveridge & Paredes, accessible at “https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00168-023-01244-z”
I don’t know about Chilean economies of scale. The article you linked was about privatization of utilities and the economies of scale in that sector.
What I do know is that in the US suburbs, my total water costs are much lower than when I lived in the city. Running clean water pipes to homes and sewage pipes is extraordinarily expensive.
Flint Michigan is looking at $600m to replace pipes to 43k homes. That’s $14k per home and then they still have to pay for water and sewer.
The average cost for a well and sceptic is $12k and then it’s free. Average water bill is $1400 a year for urban residents.
If combining utilities was cost effective, my neighborhood would have done it when it was built. It’s the same with gas lines.
yep, you’re entirely right. for your area, it’s more effective to run wells for each person. the frustrating part being that, it implies that the city has been designed so, so badly, that individuals can’t actually share resources, without the per capita price going up if they do so.
even without depopulation, that’s a huge governmental failure. if individuals are having to run all their own utility setups and infrastructure, is that even a “city”? it sounds more like rural living but it’s all vaguely connected. presumably as a result of this low density, you have higher ongoing costs elsewhere? i.e commutes to work, cost of food, etc
if not, then it could be one of those taxpayer-subsidised things, where it feels cheaper for each resident, but the reality is that someone else is paying for it. i’m not good at wording what i mean in this case, but i will pass you to this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI) to show it instead, he does a better job of explaining what i’m talking about
anyhow… that’s crazy! it’s entirely the thing i’m worried about seeing replicated large scale as a result of a reduction in population
You have a source for this claim?
Not only that, but we’re simultaneously talking about how we’re adding a force multiplier to labor with the advent and improvement of AI.
We’re literally in the process of decoupling social progress and productivity from reliance on population, and juggling the impending social burden that’s going to create if jobs decrease accordingly, yet we should be worried we’re not popping out kids to maintain population growth?
Why the fuck should we create larger generations of unemployable humans for the future we’re building?
Especially when having a kid is one of the worst possible actions you could take regarding environmental impact, and the people already alive are facing quite serious environmental consequences for such impacts.
I’ll take a crack.
Slow population loss, while concerning for policy makers, can be managed theoretically by moving money around. Taxation, subsidies, etc.
The US is currently at 1.6 fertility rate. 2.1 is replacement rate, so a pretty steep drop of 25% loss per generation. But we have substantial immigration to make up the shortfall. It’s an issue, and it’s trending down, but manageable for now.
Fertility rates of 1 or less are terrifying. Each generation is half the size of the one before. Half as many workers supporting the elderly. Retirement/pension systems will be strained then collapse, allowing retirees to fall into poverty. Half as many workers to maintain infrastructure, half as many doctors, half as many nurses, half as many experts in every field, means half as many researchers making discoveries and breakthroughs.
God forbid you go to war and have half as many soldiers to call on, from a workforce already stretched beyond any before. It’s a recipe for mass suffering in a scale never before seen.
South Korea and Japan are currently below 1. China might be even lower. People are, generally, resilient and resourceful. Adjustments will be made. People will work into their 70’s and 80’s because there is work to be done. But there will be a great deal of suffering.
If we didn’t rely on constant growth to keep our economy working this would be great news.
Yep, a planned economy is the way to go and more than doable. But so many people are jealous spiteful dimwits. So essentially, we’re fucked.
🥳🥳🥳
Two point one: That’s how many children everyone able to give birth must have to keep the human population from beginning to fall. Demographers have long expected the world will dip below this magic number—known as the replacement level—in the coming decades. A new study published last month in The Lancet, however, puts the tipping point startlingly near: as soon as 2030.
It’s no surprise that fertility is dropping in many countries, which demographers attribute to factors such as higher education levels among people who give birth, rising incomes, and expanded access to contraceptives. The United States is at 1.6 instead of the requisite 2.1, for example, and China and Taiwan are hovering at about 1.2 and one, respectively. But other predictions have estimated more time before the human population reaches the critical juncture. The United Nations Population Division, in a 2022 report, put this tipping point at 2056, and earlier this year, the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a multidisciplinary research organization dedicated to studying population dynamics, forecasted 2040.
Christopher Murray, co-author of the new study and director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), suspects his study’s forecast is conservative. “With each passing year … it’s becoming clearer that fertility is dropping faster than we expect,” he says. Because the 2030 figure is already a hastening of IHME’s previous estimate of 2034, “I would not be surprised at all if things unfold at an even faster rate,” he says.
SIGN UP FOR THE SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily A drop below replacement fertility does not mean global population will immediately fall. It will likely take about 30 additional years, or roughly how long it takes for a new generation to start to reproduce, for the global death rate to exceed the birth rate. Even then, because countries’ fertility may vary dramatically, global fertility rate is a “very abstract concept that doesn’t mean much,” says Patrick Gerland, chief of the Population Estimates and Projection Section of the U.N. Population Division. But he says the trend points to a world increasingly split between low-fertility countries, in which a diminishing number of young people support a burgeoning population of seniors; and high-fertility countries, largely poorer sub-Saharan African nations, where continued population growth could hamper development.
Estimating when the world will reach the turning point is challenging. The new model from IHME is based on how many children each population “cohort”—people born in a specific year—will give birth to over their lifetime. It captures changes such as a move to childbirth later in life. But full cohort fertility data are thus far only available for generations of people older than 50, and so the IHME model builds projections within itself to try to capture trends as they are unfolding.
A steady decline Global fertility has been dropping for several decades. Low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and high-income countries such as the United States and Japan are expected to dip below the level needed to sustain the human population in the coming decades. But a new model says the global fertility rate could drop below the replacement level as soon as 2030.
D. AN-PHAM/SCIENCE In contrast, the U.N. and Wittgenstein models are based on each country’s total fertility rate, or the sum of age-specific fertility rates, typically for those between the ages of 15 and 49, which is considered reproductive age. As a result, temporary fluctuations in childbearing behaviors—say, people decades ago delaying giving birth to children so they could advance in their education and careers—can throw off their projections, and they can miss longer term changes in childbearing behaviors. These models may have been prone to undercounting fertility in the past, then finding a temporary rebound in fertility rate, and therefore predicting a longer time frame for world population decline.
ADVERTISEMENT This is one reason that Wittgenstein is considering moving to a cohort model, says Anne Goujon, director of the Population and Just Societies Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, one of the three institutions that form the Wittgenstein Centre.
Other factors also contribute to the differences between the projections, including how the IHME model accounts for four variables that impact fertility, including access to contraceptives and higher education among those who give birth. (The other two models generally do not, although Wittgenstein considers education.)
Regardless of when the turning point comes, “growing disparity in fertility levels could contribute to widening of [other] disparities,” says Alex Ezeh, a global health professor at Drexel University, who was not involved in the Lancet study. For middle- to high-income, low-fertility countries, falling below replacement level could mean labor shortages and pressure on health care systems, nationalized health insurance, and social security programs. Meanwhile, low-income countries that still have high fertility are at heightened risk of falling further behind on the world’s economic stage, Ezeh says. “They will not be able to make the necessary investments to improve health, well-being, and education” with too few resources to support a booming population.
Although some experts, including Goujon, think there isn’t yet reason for alarm, others call for urgency. “This is going to be a very big challenge for much of the world,” Murray says. “There’s a tendency to dismiss this as sort of like, yeah, we’ll worry about it in the future. But I think it’s becoming more of an issue that has to be tackled sooner rather than later.”
Why would I want to have kids in this shithole. And I have it pretty darn good, always had enough to eat, roof over my head, relative luxuries. Still would never bring a kid into this world.
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Sounds like a problem for governments to figure out
Immigration was always an outsourced bandaid for solving population decline.
Why the fuck would I bring to the world someone to live in this overheating unrestrained capitalist hellscape ? Invisible hand my ass. The invisible hand doesn’t seem to stop them from poisoning us with forever chemicals… And so much more. Why would I bring someone to suffer ? They would surely have a worse life than me. Who wants to give that to their kids ? Who ?
Nothing wrong with that. Let population levels drip until about 2 billion or so. The rest of the worlds biosphere will thank us. Also all of humanity will thank us as life will become a whole lot more livable
Lol too late
Over what timeframe? Because if you go below a rate of what 1.8 or so you get gerontocracy and the productivity demanded of the working and child-rearing age population to support the elderly will be overwhelming meaning you’ll have an even lower birth rate meaning things get even more dire.
And yes pretty much all developed nations are at that point already: It’s either counter-steer to get up to 2.0 again, or enter a death spiral (have a look at Korea for one in full swing), or immigration but with the rest of the world ceasing to grow that won’t be a solution for long.
Good. A lower population is truthful and beautiful, as my old philosophy professor would say.
Phew. The population needs to be reduced significantly, this will help!
Does it really, though?
Every issue “overpopulation” is blamed for is just the fault of corporate greed.
Yes.
An important point for the people cheering lower population - this is way under replacement level. As previous generations die off and this becomes apparent, the fear is a sudden depopulation enough to disrupt some economies, societies. Picture Detroit, many times over (apologies to Michiganders, since I’ve been to Detroit recently and things are finally looking up after half a century of urban blight) but r pivcture infrastructure like Flint, MI water system many time over. Unstable economies and societies are bad for us all
Given that the article is posted on a science site, and people are discussing this on fairly new technology, I also want to point out that science, technology, innovation are all “luxuries” of an expanding population. As we depopulate and an increasing share of resources go toward elderly care, infrastructure, etc, that’s less for science, technology, innovation.
Some economies could use some disruption. I’m all for shaking things up a bit.
We can still eat the rich, right?
Absolutely.
The book analyzes the elements that lead different nations to succeed or fail, in the author’s opinion, focusing on demographic, geographic, and historic factors. It asserts that the period from the 1950s to the 2020s represented a peak period of rapid economic development and innovation; meanwhile, the present (2022) and future would be associated with a rather abrupt slowing of such developments. In this view, deglobalization leads to deindustrialization, deurbanization, and even depopulation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_World_Is_Just_the_Beginning
