[iiovemiku]

Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly. I had always thought that low birth rates were a problem for only countries like Germany, Spain, Japan, etc. (at least for the time being).

Seeing countries like India even out (and even going under replacement rate) gives me some heavy pessimism about population graying. I had always thought that heavy swingers like them would carry on the whole growing population thing for a good few more decades.

Looks like we're more or less on a crash course in the next few decades, especially with lifespans moving as they are.

[rqtwteye]

At some point we can’t rely on ever growing populations. It may be painful for a while but at some point growth has to stop.

[goatlover]

I've seen estimates on Earth's carrying capacity range form less than a billion to a trillion, all just depending on what you think technology and science can do in the future (think massive arcologies, super efficent AIs, giant space solar panels, and advanced molecular nanotech), and how resilient nature is.

What can be said with confidence is that the Earth currently grows enough food to support 10 billion people, when some people back in the 60s and 70s predicted massive starvation and shortages would have happened long before that.

[sexy_seedbox]

> growth has to stop

But unlimited growth is always on the menu for startups and companies! Investors, am I right?!

/s

[wongarsu]

We still won't reach peak population until 2060 at the earliest, and more likely around 2100. [1] has a good graph by region on page 4, and a graph for world population near the end. Most regions haven't reached their population peak yet and subsaharan Africa is still growing strongly.

Of course a lot of this is just delayed by higher life expectancies. Aging populations will require major social reforms in our lifetime, and I don't think society is really prepared

1: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...

[TheCoelacanth]

I think you're looking at peak population, while they are talking about peak number of children. According to some reports, the number of children has already peaked[1]. The remaining growth is just momentum from past births.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-13/earths-population-rea...

[Dylan16807]

You think they're doing the thing they explicitly stated they were doing?

[missedthecue]

People live for 80-100 years, so the population will gradually tick up. But once the very top-heavy global population pyramid begins to die off, things get extremely ugly, extremely quickly. In our lifetimes, we are going to see a horrific amount of elder poverty.

[Nicholas_C]

Will be very troublesome for countries with low fertility that can’t attract immigrants to keep the population from declining.

[missedthecue]

Countries like India, all of South East Asia, all of LatAm, a good amount of North Africa... all below replacement and falling fast. Argentina's incoming preschool class in 2024 is 30% smaller than the class of 2020. That's how quickly this is happening.

[grecy]

> Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly

Are you worried 8 billion is somehow not enough humans?

[BurningFrog]

A big dividing line is between those who think people are a burden vs those who think they're an asset.

I've grown convinced people are overwhelmingly an asset. In a rough sense that means they/we produce more value than they consume on average.

I think debates about population size are mostly really about this difference.

[abdullahkhalids]

The key phrase in your problem statement is "more value", which assumes that all value can be projected onto a single axis. Typically [1], this means that you can assign a dollar value to any change in the physical world [2].

The "debate" for many people is whether this simplistic economic model can be used at all. They say that value is multi-dimensional, and those value dimensions are not fungible. Concretely, if making a medicine factory results in the extinction of a specie, you can't say that it is okay, because the benefit of the former is incomparable to the loss of the latter.

Coming to population, more humans mean more destruction of ecosystems. And it is not clear whether destroying ecosystems can be fungibly compared to the additional human economic value those extra humans create. It's not about more or less, it the incomparability of the two.

[1] but not necessarily what you meant

[2] Just to be clear, the economics discipline already has a wealth of research that humans cannot in fact consistently assign absolute or relative dollar values to the same thing. Yet our political-economy and popular conceptions have this as a central assumption.

[BurningFrog]

[1] is right.

This argues against something I didn't say and don't believe.

[snapcaster]

Thanks for putting this so well, I think that is the divide as well. I've struggled to express this idea without being too offensive to the "liability" camp but i think you've made it more clear and less emotionally charged

[Dylan16807]

The way the burdens and assets scale is non-linear. There's no reason to expect that we always or never want the population to go up, regardless of current population.

And we went from 1 billion to 2 billion to 8 billion very very fast. The burdens are really piling up.

[BurningFrog]

You're clearly on the other side of this dividing line.

[Dylan16807]

Don't label me so quickly.

I'm not saying we need less population at present.

I'm just saying that at some point the cost outweighs the benefit. And humanity has been trying pretty hard to go toward that point.

Do you really think it will always, always be better to have more people? If you say no to this, then you don't get to say we're on different sides of the line. If you say yes, then you need to explain how that's physically possible.

[BurningFrog]

OK, I over-interpreted your position.

Not that there is anything wrong with disagreeing with me on this.

Two point as a taste:

1. One way more people is always better is in invention. Ten billon heads invent more than one.

2. People always worry that with more people there will be food shortage. They are also always empirically wrong. Because food is made by people! Twice as many people means twice as many farmers!

[39896880]

“Number of humans” is a nonsensical metric because it doesn’t acknowledge the systems that humans comprise. For example, we depend on the young to earn/work and the middle aged to earn/work/invest to support the old/disabled. What happens when there are fewer young people, and then fewer middle aged people, to support the old /disabled not in just a few pockets of the world but in many countries all at once is still very much unknown.

It’s not the number of humans, it’s the age distribution of those humans + where they live.

Put another way: you can “feel” like the world needs fewer people, but you’re probably not going to like what your world looks like when that desire comes true.

[magicalhippo]

The issue is that a lot of countries have based everything around growth, including population.

Pensions is a big one, another one is care for elders.

It's not a problem if we had eased up to say 1 billion and stayed there, but the rate of change is quite abrupt.

[grecy]

> The issue is that a lot of countries have based everything around growth, including population

And it is very, very ,very clear this is a horribly stupid and shortsighted thing to do. It is simply impossible to have constant growth, clearly it is unsustainable.

The system HAS to change. It might be from a slow and steady decline, or it might be a very abrupt change, but it's going to change one way or another.

[hehdhdjehehegwv]

100% agree, this is not a real problem and is better than the alternative.

[sidewndr46]

Yeah, I've never understood the panic over a declining birth rate. Are we to be scared that long after we're all dead and gone there would only be several billion humans on this planet?

[lotsofpulp]

The concern is increasing taxation of the young, productive population to sustain the old, non productive population causing political turmoil and decreasing national competitiveness on the global scale.

[nasmorn]

Clearly the old people of the future(us) will fight for their pensions in the thunderdome. Which also perfectly explains a lot of the ads I got recently about very muscular old guys

[missedthecue]

Really, they will fight in the voting booth. Imagine US politics right now, but the boomer generation is 3x as big. That is going to be reality in most democracies in the next 20-40 years.

[rufus_foreman]

Good point, young people just out of college who have lived off of their parents and the government for a quarter of a century might get upset about having to support non-productive people.

[ncruces]

People will finally figure out that they're only productive for about a half their lives, and that it's not just the last quarter that they need help with, it's also the first.

The real problem is the transition period where there are more unproductive people than not, because the stock of existing people is still here. That's why a crashing population is bad.

[jackcosgrove]

The question is if the complex society we have built actually requires growth to maintain it. In other words, our society requires 0.6 lives of work rather than 0.5.

If this is the case, even a steady state would mean a lowered standard of living.

It's hard to know, as our societies have decided to reduce costs on the front end (lowered birth rate) rather than on the back end (decreased longevity). That's understandable as someone who is never born doesn't suffer, but it's the worse solution from a social maintenance standpoint.

[faeriechangling]

The impact won't just be after we're dead, we're simply going to have less warm bodies to provide us care when we're seniors and retired than exist today. Schemes like social security, pensions, etc which are financed by new entrants into the system will also become fiscally unviable and benefits WILL be reduced.

[iiovemiku]

Population increase (and the increase of its increase) has always been a constant for as long as I've lived so yes I suppose. I don't think we are prepared for the spout of working-age people to start slowing down (especially with the population of the elderly only getting higher).

Assuming we only get this planet though, I suppose it couldn't've gone like this forever haha.

[missedthecue]

People all age at the same rate. 8 billion old people is a very scary prospect indeed. It's honestly shocking we ever talk about anything else.

[throwawaymaths]

it's scary because our form of capitalism (growth capitalism) is not the right type of capitalism for that situation. And, policymakers don't seem to fully grasp that you need to prepare ahead for demographic shifts (for example, china deciding to try to goose population growth by substituting one-child for "please make the state three+ babies" as if that doesn't only help after at least two decades)

[moralestapia]

Yes, I am. Humans don't live forever. No offspring and it's all gone in one generation, disregarding if they're 8 billion or 100 billion.

[Retric]

Humanity will eventually go extinct, but birth rates would need to decline much further or stay this for a very long time before it’s a meaningful issue.

Further, people alive in 2300 will be decedents of people who chose to have kids generation after generation despite living in an industrialized environment. That self selection both in terms of DNA and culture means a population bounce back becomes increasingly likely over time especially as fewer people means less pollution and less competition for resources.

Humanity might even end up cycling through industrialization, collapse, hunter gatherers, agriculture, industrialization, multiple times before settling on some stable equilibrium. You just can’t extrapolate exponential curves indefinitely when they depend on the population size.

[tlocke]

Yes, fertility is heritable.

[Lammy]

Luckily I'm one of the Chosen Few who would always have been allowed to exist.

[casercaramel144]

I mean yeah. Not existing has a utility value of 0. You can make the same argument for people who don't exist yet. Is it infinite utility to go around as a government and force people to pump out 100 babies a year? Since not existing is so bad?

TBH if I never existed by definition I would be fine with it, you know, since I don't exist and was never born. I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV, since the optimal solution seems relentless expansionism like a virus.

[Lammy]

> I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV

I do, because second-person collectively-singular Humanity is a living thing all its own, and the more humans there are the more alive We are. Your argument is the anthropological equivalent of “640K ought to be enough for anybody”.

[harimau777]

Having more than 640Kb of RAM isn't a good in of itself, it's only good in that applications arose which required more RAM.

Similarly higher population isn't a good in of itself. It seems to me that there's much less evidence that there's something that needs higher population.

I don't see how higher population necessarily makes humanity as a collective organism more human. That seems like saying that an individual human is more human if they weigh more.

[Lammy]

> I don't see how

Try ketamine some time with good sensory deprivation — comfy bed, silk sleep mask, ear plugs :)

[casercaramel144]

So by the tyranny of exponential growth, we should just start building massive breeding factories and forceably enslaving people randomly matching them to have children? Because this could actually be the optimal policy if we take your view of "second persons" to it's optimum.

In your world governments forceably breed humans like chickens in massive factory farms churning out people to the carrying capacity of the planet. I don't want to live there and I sure as hell don't find it moral.

[ipaddr]

Why not encourage through policy and taxation changes? Invest in culture that promotes. Restructure society to encourage having babies at an earlier age.

[Lammy]

> Because this could actually be the optimal policy if we take your view of "second persons" to it's optimum.

Maybe if you're evil enough to not care about any individual human's quality of life. Is there a word for the logical fallacy where you argue against the most absurd possible interpretation of a person's beliefs in order to feel no guilt for disregarding them?

[snapcaster]

You think maybe there could be a pretty large spectrum of solutions between stopping population growth and massive forced breeding factories?