Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell)

South Korea is being used as an extreme example of negative population growth, but it is affecting all developed nations to a greater or lesser degree.

Insert obligatory "Malthus was wrong" meme here, but it's actually kind of ironic that humans have seemingly decided to solve the (presumed) problem of infinite population growth without any special persuasion or government policy at all.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 5th 2023 at 8:39:08 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The tendency of developed countries to enter population decline is a big part of what has inspired my preferred solution to the Fermi Paradox.

The idea is that the trend for advanced civilizations is for their populations to stabilize at well below their home planet's carrying capacity. This combined with extreme difficulty and risk of interstellar travel, creates a paradox where the only civilizations that can travel the stars don't have any real incentive to do so.

Even when stars die, it's just more practical to move out to the outer reaches of the solar system during the Red Giant phase before moving back in during the white dwarf phase then to travel interstellar distances. Because again, their population never grows high enough to justify the risks and costs of interstellar emigration.

Over very long timescales this solution does break down. The white dwarf phase doesn't last forever, there are cosmic events that could force a civilization to abandon their homeworld, and in spite of large-scale interstellar travel being worth the costs doesn't mean it will never be done. However these principles will keep the pace of interstellar settlement slow enough that insufficient time has passed since the birth of the universe for even the oldest civilizations to spread to more than a handful of star systems.

And while I'll fully admit that drawing wide conclusions from a single trend that may or may not be long-lasting on a single planet is very risky, it's slightly less risky then drawing wide conclusions from ZERO examples, which most Fermi paradox solutions are based on.

As for the issue of population decline, I think in the end the world population will stabilize at a lower level, it's just a question of if it will be a messy stabilization or a clean stabilization. If it's clean, then we will eventually nail down the right incentives and practices to ensure that people have enough children to replace themselves without interfering with personal freedom or prosperity. If it's messy, then we'll see a breakdown of the systems that are causing population decline as a side effect, which will trigger a rise in population until such systems can be repaired, rinse and repeat.

As mentions, I think that theres a good chance that the trends they mention are also also temporary and will stabalize — granted, they might cause lots of problems in the meantime. But a lot is resting on the premise that this trend will continue, fertility will continue to decline, etc. If this gets lots of awareness, I suspect there are several possible solutions that will start to manifest

More broadly— this is a result of capitalism failing to account for important aspects of the economy: childrearing. Basically:

• market economies quantify and organize the "contribution" of each person through the medium of money (in theory)
• The work done by women (specifically, raising and carrying to term children), is not included or quantified in this system.
• in fact, women who are doing this work get LESS money because theyre spending their time and energy on dangerous, difficult work that isnt "counted"
• so, when given the choice, the women stop doing it and choose to do work that DOES give them rewards
• whoops, no one is doing the child birthing and raising anymore

Within a capitalist or welfare-capitalist system, you have two choices

• provide payment for this work. Kindergelt, UBI for kids, or even just flat-out pay for "birth mother" as type of employment. (this would include payments not in "money", but in access to free childcare or food, for example)
  • this might happen between countries as well— for example people in rich countries paying women in poor countries to give birth to a baby for them. For an "Adoption fee"
• enslave or partially enslave women, force them to preform this work for free (either directly, taliban style, or indirectly, by preventing them from participating in the paid workforce)
• keep entire countries poor, so they keep having children for free, and import their best and brightest as immigrants

You could also drop capitalism entirely, though that is a much bigger topic. And still leads to some of the same conclusions

I think theres some resistance to this idea because we don't like the idea of counting "giving birth" as quantifiable market "work" (raising kids as "work" is somewhat more acceptable, though theres still some resistance.) But from an economic standpoint, it absolutely is! Dangerous work, too— easily up there with high-mortality jobs like logging and working on oil rigs. It can and I suspect will, be subject to capitalism

At least that method gets the payment directly to the people doing the job

Edited by Tremmor19 on Oct 5th 2023 at 8:30:27 AM

I'm not sure paying women to give birth is a great idea, it may give the wrong kind of incentive. No one wants a situation where women are getting pregnant for the money and then putting the baby up for adoption or in an orphanage.

Optimism is a duty.

Yea that's fair lol. I kinda wrote that out without thinking too deeply about the details. That said, Id still endorse the general premise of explicitly valuing it as work, and providing enough support that raising a child is cheap or free

I suppose it would also depend on where you think the bottleneck is— paying people to have kids would only make sense if you believe you have a situation where people are willing to raise/adopt kids, but bottlenecked by a lack of babies. If the bottleneck is actually *taking care of* the children, that's trickier to handle

Well, again, paying people to have kids can encourage really undesirable behaviour, in much the same way China's one child policy gave rise to some seriously bad behaviour from parents.

Optimism is a duty.

I doubt that the population is going to continuously decline. It wasn't very long ago that people were worried that it would continuously grow exponentially. At some point it will level off and remain fairly stable.

I think the fears about population decline reveal some very serious flaws in the dominant systems the world is built on right now. I don't think this would be nearly as big of a problem if economies didn't rely on constant growth 📈.

Sure we can subsidize people to have larger families, but I think there need to be much more fundamental changes made

I'm also questioning the idea that our planet isn't full. We certainly couldn't sustain the current Western footprint for the entire current world population. Either we lower the footprint in general, or we lower the population, or we run headlong into climate change and extinction waves and all that entails.

Optimism is a duty.

Estimates of the maximum carrying capacity of Earth generally assume that we will use technology to make our civilization sustainable as a whole while maintaining standards of living macroscopically similar to what the Western middle-class enjoys.

It's a difficult question to answer because of all the variables, but the latest figure I've heard is around 11 billion. Obviously if we keep consuming resources and polluting the way we do, that number will be drastically lower.

Ultimately, human population will be constrained by how we treat our environment. That's the sort of thing that should be axiomatic. But the narrative that we have to dramatically reduce standards of living is untrue, if we adopt sustainable resource usage.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 6th 2023 at 2:02:45 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I imagine family units becoming smaller in other ways also influences the slower growth/stagnation. Apart from the kids, in the older times families also tended to include the grandparents and uncles/aunts/cousins/etc didn't they? That also (hopefully at least) helped out with the raising of the kids somewhat as well as the general house businesses.

Nowadays it's shameful if you haven't left the house yet you parasite.

Edited by alekos23 on Oct 6th 2023 at 10:37:01 PM

Secret Signature

I have this sort of half-formed idea that the effort-per-kid just keeps rising, and the expense keeps rising, and at some point there's a point where... The total amount of kid-care needed for replacement rates exceeds the total amount that the population can or will do for free

You can lower the costs (as in financial), and lower the effort (more free daycare, free nannies for the first year?). You can't pay someone to love a child, but you can sure pay someone to change diapers and wipe up spills and watch the baby so the parents can nap

Part of the other issue here is that we put the financial burden of childhood on the parents because we think of children as "property" of parents. But if everyone gets their childhood paid for, then we all pay for the next generation of children— like, you're not paying to help the parents, you're paying to support the child. And as a bonus, reduce the legal ownership of parents over their children

Edited by Tremmor19 on Oct 6th 2023 at 5:18:55 AM

I mean, given the sort of helicopter parenting that is expected in the US, it's no wonder the birth rate is dropping.

And most people really don't mind raising their children "for free", you know.

Edited by Redmess on Oct 6th 2023 at 11:25:38 AM

Optimism is a duty.

^ theres a difference between loving, playing with and caring for your child for free, and doing a full-time job of washing and cleaning and feeding and diapers and planning and transportation, for free. Not even for free— it costs money!

Basically, I think theres a significant population who would be happy to provide a loving, supportive home for a kid if they had for example, a nanny or a housekeeper to do some of the actual physical labor, but aren't willing to do it themselves.

side note, this opinion is a work in progress. So forgive me if this contradicts my previous posts on the topic— Im thinking it through in post form

Edited by Tremmor19 on Oct 6th 2023 at 6:32:15 AM

I mean, that's how people have done it for tens of thousands of years, and it's worked pretty well overall.

Optimism is a duty.

Many countries in Europe provided paid parental leave for up to several years. This hasn't necessarily stopped the decling rate of population growth, but it's certainly a good incentive for those who want to start a family.

Do they know if it has any noticeable effect?

@tremmor, I'm reminded of the phrase "it takes a village to raise a child". an idiom that I think stemmed from how childcare seemed to be a more communal activity.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Oct 8th 2023 at 6:45:05 AM

yea, exactly! we didnt use to do all this stuff just as two or one person. But unless you plan to legislate that everyone go back to living in multigenerational family households, providing direct assistance for the most labor-intensive parts of a childs life could cover some of that (and it has the advantage that it doesnt tie young parents to their families of origin, which may be unavailable or just not a good option for everyone)

Edited by Tremmor19 on Oct 9th 2023 at 5:48:53 AM

That sort of legislation would be unenforceable, short of turning into a second China. No one would comply, and enforcing it would be pretty draconian.

Optimism is a duty.

Theories on life from the early universe.

SoundCloud

I guess this was announced almost two weeks ago, but I just stumbled upon it on Youtube and I don't remember seeing it mentioned here. They made a VR game.

Edited by TParadox on Oct 10th 2023 at 7:36:40 AM

Fresh-eyed movie blog

It doesn't seem to be on their Youtube channel, which explains why people missed it.

Optimism is a duty.

If anyone's got an hour to spend, new video is the last 4.5 billion years in an hour. This is gonna be good.

Secret Signature

Eternity is watching hundreds of millions of years zoom by in an hour and still feeling like an eternity. And then it gets suddenly very exciting in the last five minutes.

Optimism is a duty.

I think the ocean should have been greener in the earlier parts, before oxygen became a major component of the atmosphere.

The ocean was green back then, because iron rusts green in anaerobic environments and there was a lot of iron in the ocean. (It all rusted red after oxygen happened and sank out of the oceans and that's why there's huge iron stripes in nearly all rocks of a certain age)

---

That aside, it is interesting to think about how for the vast majority of that time period shown, there was life, it was just single-celled organisms, mostly living in the oceans.

Life emerged pretty much right after there was liquid water, but it didn't get big for billions of years.