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
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.
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.
We’d all like to think that but Ben is married and has a kid (maybe more? Idk that much about him), don’t know about Jones, and Trump has several kids.
There are obviously plenty of women around stupid enough to reproduce with them.
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.
Oh no! The capitalists will have to charge LESS to be competitive as the market shrinks! The Horror!! I have yet to find compelling arguments that a shirking population is anything anyone alive has to worry about. If anything, we should be mocking the people who are so concerned about future generations not even born yet when we can’t take care of the people we have now.
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.
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.
“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 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 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 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 “link.springer.com/article/…/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.
Interesting. My water bill is around $800 per year, and that includes sewerage service. That well would take 15 years to reach cost parity, and that’s leaving out the septic system.
And wells are decidedly not free after installation, if my parents’ experience is anything to go by. (Nothing catastrophic, to they just had to pay for pump maintenance occasionally.)
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 (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
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…
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.
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.”
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.
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.
And at least in most places of the world, you are unlikely to ever achieve financial security because the government inflates your fiat currency until it’s worthless.
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?
I figure it’s a combination of problems. I come home from work exhausted and don’t want to go out. So I’m at home alone. On the bad side, the work, the stress, the balance of keeping everything because the way the modern world has gone to make it difficult to look for new jobs especially if you lost yours just makes going out difficult.
But that’s because to “go out” I’d have to drive half an hour or more away to maybe a bar. And the bar is filled with people who are going to visit said bar.
We’re at a point where it’s easier to communicate with people hundreds of miles away instead of someone in our neighborhood, and comfortable enough to do it, while stressed enough to not make the attempts. Stack on those that are married, there’s the problem of just having enough time of day from both people having to work overtime.
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