[i_idiot]

What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.

[akudha]

I don’t know what the right number is, but 8+ Billion doesn’t seem sustainable. It might be, if humans respected the environment, are nicer to each other etc. Since that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon, the next best option might be to just have less humans, which hopefully might lead to less pollution, less exploitation of the environment etc

[vachina]

The top 1% is freaking out at the thought of population shrinking because the cogs of the machine won’t turn itself.

[btilly]

The other 99% is even more dependent on the machine than the top 1%. They can build themselves reinforced bunkers, just in case. What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down?

Does that sound like an extremely unlikely outcome? Back in 2008, we came within hours of credit cards stopping working. Projections say that if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down. Mass hunger is not far behind that. And there is nothing like mass hunger to destroy a society.

Esoteric problems in financial markets have real world consequences. We've gone nearly a century since the last real demonstration of that. Don't discount the possibility that the next demonstration will be within your lifetime. And in our more interconnected world, it's likely to be a lot worse.

[toomuchtodo]

This is a call for community and durable systems that serve the human instead of traditional systems built to aggregate and funnel capital to a few. The fertility crisis is a capital crisis (taxpayers needed to pay back debt issued today decades into the future, workers for corporate profits), not a crisis for the individual. I see it as an exciting opportunity to maintain and improve quality of life for humans while solving for decoupling from these suboptimal systems primarily built to extract and exploit. Solarpunk vibes.

https://ilsr.org/ is one resource, there are more.

(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)

[imtringued]

Uh no?

The fertility crisis is an entirely individual crisis. You are a parent and you raise children

Your children's pension contributions are paid out to someone else, leaving less for you.

Having your own children no longer ensures your retirement, so you don't have them in the first place.

The problem couldn't be more individual than that.

[trumpdong]

You're describing a systemic problem. An individual problem is: my paycheque is next week but I need to pay rent this week. That's a problem specific to me. A systemic problem is: paycheques aren't big enough to cover rent any more. It's a problem that affects a large number of people. Systems are comprised of individuals but describing a systemic problem from the perspective of one individual doesn't change the nature of the problem.

[toomuchtodo]

Having children in no way guarantees they will provide for you in old age. Stop by your local retirement home and ask how many kids stop by to see their parents. Free will is a thing, children are not assets.

[matchbok3]

Corporate profits are good, they help companies make new things.

Do you think they should lose money? How would you be typing on a computer if that evil, evil company didn't make a profit?

There is a reason every communist society has failed.

[tikkabhuna]

There is a huge gap between capitalism and communism.

Just like how pure communism doesn’t work, neither does pure capitalism.

[btilly]

I could rant about the stupidity of spending fossil fuels, to grow biofuels, for no net gain in energy. But with a definite cost in engine wear.

That said, like Democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except all of the others that have been tried. And there have been enough alternate experiments that I wouldn't want to literally bet my life on the next one working better.

[toomuchtodo]

Europe has done fairly well imho balancing socialism with capitalism and free market mechanisms, good patterns exist today I argue, even if they need tweaks and improvement. Importantly, these demographic curves are locked in for decades into the future, so might as well get comfortable with forward curve of change, we aren't going back to the historical demographic growth curve in anyone's lifetime, if ever. Plan, forecast, and model accordingly.

The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)

(~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size, the remainder will follow in time)

[matchbok3]

Europe's "socialist" only works because they depend on the USA for military protection and tech innovation. Or oil revenues.

[trumpdong]

The free market is a very good starting point indeed, but it shouldn't be confused with Capitalism. Ironically, the free market best embodies the Communist slogan "let a million flowers bloom". Capitalism is more like giving Elon a lawnmower.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down

Except for the very last step in the chain I find it hard to believe that credit cards play much of a role.

[btilly]

How does almost everyone pay for food at the grocery store? If stores don't have a good way to get money from customers, how do they pay the next step up the line?

[trumpdong]

During COVID we all saw how the government can just override all this and ensure what needs to be done is done and what cannot be done is avoided - something we always thought was impossible. Yet we all quickly forgot this happened and now we're back to assuming it can't happen.

[bombcar]

During COVID we saw all sorts of insanity (semi trucks dumping tens of thousands of gallons of milk into the drains because they couldn't travel to the closed packaging plants).

Food distribution will still continue until the raw resources necessary crap out. Shelves won't go empty immediately, but once there's no gas for the trucks and tractors, then you'll be happy to be near the Amish.

[Henchman21]

You don’t think goods are acquired on credit?

Or are you focused pedantically on credit cards?

[BigTTYGothGF]

If OP hadn't said "credit cards" I wouldn't have commented.

[rekabis]

> What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down?

300 acres on the westward-facing slope of the interior cascade temperate rainforest. Even if the entire region sees extended drying over the next 50, there will still be sufficient rainfall for crops. All it will need are a few holding pools to reliably produce a year-round supply.

It’s also reasonably remote, difficult to reach unless you know of the specific path, and reasonably defensible.

[forlorn_mammoth]

Great idea! Let's scale this out so that everyone can have this same basic security!

[foobiekr]

Until you get cancer.

Survivalist fantasies aren’t realistic.

[rekabis]

It’s 30 minutes to the nearest town with a hospital. 2hrs from a moderate metro city with a large hospital. It’s isolated, not hundreds-of-km into the boonies.

[tikkabhuna]

I don’t think anyone is going to be working at the hospital if they have to start dedicating their time to survival?

[theflyinghorse]

Top 1% are too divorced from the real world to have ever seen a cog.

[M95D]

But they have some ideea how many people need to work to make them that much money.

[trumpdong]

Not really. They think LLMs can replace workers.

[foobiekr]

Being able to punish and control others, especially sexual exploitation, is a huge part of the draw. You need lots of slaves for that.

[Ajedi32]

If the "cogs of the machine" freeze up and economy tanks the top 1% will be fine. You might not be.

[danny_codes]

Depends what we mean by freeze up. Revolutions usually mean some part of the elite class gets killed or exiled. Happens all the time.

[Enginerrrd]

Revolutions almost always involve one faction of the elites using the masses against another faction.

[OutOfHere]

Isn't that what AI and robots are intended to be for? As for the customers, B2B could still work.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

We only have one modern example of demographic crash to study... Japan.

Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.

So far, it looks to be a way for slow extinction of a culture.

[guyzero]

Japan, a country famous for no one knowing what its culture is.

[dyauspitr]

Reading about it in books and watching anime won’t prevent them from going functionally extinct in less than 200 years.

[guyzero]

No one cares. Japanese culture today is nothing like it was 200 years ago.

[dyauspitr]

I care. I don’t want the country of Japan to be a bunch of starving geriatrics a few decades from now.

[functionmouse]

I care

[kordlessagain]

doubtful

[N_Lens]

Ever heard of Malthus?

[goodpoint]

Yes, a deeply flawed theory.

[N_Lens]

The point is Malthus was very popular in his day and his predictions appeared iron clad, just like predictions about population collapse seem to be today. Many countries enacted population control programs due to his influence.

Reality often has a funny way of evading predictions.

[trumpdong]

Right. No species has ever overpopulated itself to extinction. Certainly no human sect. Why are there statue heads on an unpopulated island anyway?

[triceratops]

I don't believe that will happen.

[dyauspitr]

It will if nothing changes. That’s a certainty. But yes something might change.

[Qem]

> Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.

And this was in a developed country well resourced to take the hit.

[throwyawayyyy]

I mean, if Japan is the world's future, isn't that kind of... good? It's not the first place I think of when I think of a failing country.

[guyzero]

Japan is not without problems related to a shrinking population i.e. https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/05/21/japans-immigration-poli...

but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.

[Hendrikto]

> but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants

This has been tried extensively e.g. in Germany, France, Sweden, Canada, …. It did not work out great.

[guyzero]

Canada has always accepted immigrants. Rapidly increasing the number of foreign students to goose the slumping post-secondary education sector did not work out great. Even with the reductions, there are always immigrants coming into Canada.

[mystreamlincar]

Except the fertility rate is declining worldwide

[bamboozled]

It's causing massive issues in Japan, unless you read those Instagram posts that tell you everything is perfect.

[everdrive]

Ah yes, the hellscape that is Japan. The Japanese are currently fleeing to South Sudan and Darfur in hopes of a better life.

[belval]

The 42.7M tourists that went there in 2025 just enjoyed seeing the incredible decay of a dying country, a morbid fascination or sorts. /s (obviously)

[m4rtink]

You can actually see it if you know where to look - edges of big cities but it is most visible in the countryside and smaller towns.

And if you want to see how real Armageddon looks like, go visit Yubari: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABbari,_Hokkaido

The collapse was due to local coal mining no longer being viable, but it still demonstrates how it looks like when a city goes from 107000 people in 1960 to 5600 in 2025.

Large empty areas where homes and factories used to be, old billboards for stuff that no longer exists, whole school buildings and gymnasiums out of use and overgrown. Most shops closed or hardly open & few remaining occupied buildings in the middle of it.

Was a really special experience & the local coal mining museum was super interesting - just wondering for how long it can continue going...

[bombcar]

Seems somewhat better than Detroit.

The question really is - how does an abandoned town hurt us? Sure, there may be some sympathy and loss for "what once was" (same as the pictures of the abandoned classrooms in Prypiat).

The US has had similar things happen but the spread out population has given it some resiliency (many towns that "collapsed" when the mill/factory/whatever shut down continue in a strange afterlife as a suburb of a nearby city).

[m4rtink]

One general side effect is harder access to affected regions - with less people to serve public transport gets reduced or even abandoned entirely (affect rail lines the most, due to the necessary maintenance needed for safe operation). IIRC there are numerous rural lines scheduled to be closed in the near future in Hokkaido for example (and of course a bunch of them got abolished in the Yubari area).

Is this a problem ? I guess not really & it might actually help the nature regenerate in those areas.

Where it can be a bigger problem is various small islands - where the islands being inhabited makes a big difference in territorial claims & is a very important thing in regards to what China has been doing (building artificial islands, etc.). For that reason I suspect the Japanese government subsidizes island communities quite heavily to keep them going & keeping suverenity over those islands and the surrounding sea.

[pibaker]

Cancun has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But I guess we shouldn't care about it because thousands of Americans fly there for vacation every day.

[matchbok3]

Tourism != real life.

Or are you joking? I hope so, because it takes a certain kind of stupid to not understand the very very bad things that a shrinking population would cause.

[Unit327]

The impacts haven't really been seen yet because Japan is still on the flat apex of the population curve, but the rollercoaster is about to start diving.

https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp_zenkoku...

[calepayson]

Shot in the dark but my sense is that a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens. I feel pretty confident that ai will eventually be a large driver of growth but I do worry about whether it'll come soon enough.

[happytoexplain]

>a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens

What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit; or for the population to dip to some number and settle there, rather than increase; the explanations seem to become circular very quickly. I know it's partially my fault for not having a very strong economic education, but it also feels like something is fundamentally wrong with the theories - like they are making some underlying assumption about what is "good" that I don't share. But I can never seem to get down to it.

The only thing I understand is that as the ratio of old to young grows, more taxes are needed, of course. But that would only be painful during a significant rate of change, not after the number is stable, no? Is that really somehow apocalyptic?

[quickthrowman]

> What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit;

It’s very simple.

If you make $1M in profit in a year and the following year you also make $1M but inflation was 3%, you earned 3% less money than you did the year before. The nominal profit was the same but the real profit was lower.

To earn the same real return with 3% inflation you would need to earn $1.03M the year after you earn $1M. If your profits grew less than inflation, you made less money and your company is worth less as a result.

Monetary policy people figures out that a small amount of controlled inflation that incentivizes investing is better than deflation which encourages people to hoard cash. Some people disagree with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_and_nominal_value

[trumpdong]

That's not actual growth though, that's just measuring the same business in a different unit worth 0.97 of the old unit. The business can be the same size.

[quickthrowman]

The question asked was “Why is it bad to earn a constant (in nominal terms) profit rather than an increasing profit.” The size of the business is irrelevant to this question. I answered the question, the short answer is ‘inflation’.

When responding to a question, I choose to answer the question the person asked instead of another question they didn’t ask.

[trumpdong]

They didn't say "(in nominal terms)" and businesses are expected to grow in real terms.

[boelboel]

There's no reason to think things would stabilize but even if things roughly stabilize in terms of population there's problems.

When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.

[btilly]

Here is what it actually means.

When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?

When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?

But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.

This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?

History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.

[tzs]

> When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?

> When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?

Is it necessary to have a growing population in order to have a growing economy?

For much of human history I'd guess the answer was yes, because the size of the economy was based almost entirely on how much physical work people did, but the modern economy is very different from historical economies.

[Qem]

> Is it necessary to have a growing population in order to have a growing economy?

Soon we will discover. I suspect the answer will be no, at least not for long. Markets are made of people. Can the economy grow despite a shrinking market losing economies of scale everywhere? I hope, but I don't count on it.

[NoGravitas]

You've given a good explanation of how it works -- under a mode of production concerned primarily with the exchange value of goods, not their use value. If what you want to do is to provide adequate/growing use value, you can do that instead and allocate resources based on need rather than on investment value.

[bpt3]

Use value and exchange value are highly correlated for basically all goods other than collectibles and luxury items, and even then their "use" often is providing an emotional boost to their owner.

It seems like you're recommending socialism without coming out and saying it?

[trumpdong]

I think I read several economic metrics are now worse than in the Great Depression, but I can't remember which ones. Probably something to do with energy prices.

[imtringued]

There is this thing called a zero lower bound. Then there is this thing called liquidity preference, which is basically the minimum fee someone accepts to part with liquidity.

Add those two together and you will get a minimum positive return constraint on capital.

Capital can only pay a return if it is fully utilized. This means there needs to be enough demand to saturate the machine.

You can never have any form of excess capacity, because excess physical capital does not generate any returns. It actually loses you money, which is incompatible with the positive return constraint.

Since the expected return is positive, the lender has to pay back more than he borrowed, meaning that he has to have more revenue and more revenue is earned by selling more products.

Now, this alone doesn't explain the reason why you have to keep going though.

The question is, when someone demands positive returns and those returns are artificially anchored against zero thanks to the ZLB, why is this bad.

Well, think about what happens if nobody borrows the money. That means the money is still waiting for a borrower and it is not turning into demand. Now there is money missing in the economy. The rest of the money has to circulate faster to compensate the loss of money but it doesn't, because everyone is thinking the same thing.

The problem here isn't on the business side. The problem is that someone decided to use an unsigned integer for something that can be negative.

You need money for daily transactions. You don't care about the nominal value of the money as a "store of value", you care about it as a way to turn your illiquid work output into a liquid voucher you can redeem at any store.

Since modern society depends on money, having the money system degrade is similar to an internet or electricity outage.

So what happens instead is that the government takes on more debt because that is the logic of a zero lower bound.

It also forces the central banks to do QE, because there is nothing you can do at zero.

In both cases, the system is being flooded with the same defective money. Someone will hold onto it, due to their liquidity preference and the lack of negative interest rates.

[trumpdong]

Is the zero lower bound still true? You have effectively negative returns on cash due to inflation (and infinitely negative returns if the economy breaks so hard we have to switch to a new currency) and physical capital depreciates too. There may be a zero nominal lower bound on cash but that doesn't mean anything due to inflation.

[saintvlad]

> more taxes are needed

Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.

[sethammons]

Jetson style, we should all be complaining about our 3hr workdays. We produce enough. Distribution is the problem.

[trumpdong]

I think it means, for example, the stock market collapses if there's no more growth, that means everyone loses their pension fund, and may try to save more to compensate, that means no more consumption and no more economy (paradox of thrift). It's a tall house of cards society rests upon.

[calepayson]

Honestly great question. I think of it as:

I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.

I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.

[tavavex]

But isn't this just a more abstract example of the 'circular explanations' thing that OP mentioned? The reason why we need compound interest on our savings accounts instead of just being able to put away some money every year is a product of having to counteract inflation, which is the result of policies trying to induce growth by making saving less appealing than putting the money into more companies making more things for more profit. We need infinite growth because everything around us is designed to expect infinite growth. But what happens as we start running out of headroom? Is there really no other way at all?

[bobson381]

We are going to find out. See Limits to Growth.

[bombcar]

There existed ways to build a family/home/retire before the financialization of everything - those ways still exist and still work, even if disadvantaged.

[trumpdong]

Do they? Is there a way to get land without buying it from someone who currently owns it? I'm totally fine with building supplies costing money since you can scale that from a tiny shack to a mansion (or a sleeping bag in the dirt) based on your wealth, but the price of the smallest parcel of land seems to be a lower bound on how much you can spend.

[bombcar]

Yes, depending on what you consider "buying" and perhaps what you consider "owns", and it varies by country.

The practicalities are that the places you can use the "tricks" (like homesteading still being valid, or mining claims, etc) are places where the land is so cheap as to be free (or nearly so, eBay has "land" available for a few dollars, because you pay lawyers $500 for the transfer and the land is somewhere in the Nevada desert).

Practical usable land (for some value of "you could grow things on it, and it's not a desert") seems to put a lower bound in the USA of about $1,000 an acre.

The problem is most people want said land to be within commuting distance of a job, where it jumps to $5-15,000 an acre.

[lenkite]

Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers. As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.

Basically, the billionaires dislike it and hence are changing the message. They want you to be ants.

[penteract]

> As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.

Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...

[calepayson]

I'm not sure the Black Death is a good example of gradual population decline

[g3f32r]

> Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers.

Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.

[danny_codes]

Except for outsourcing, of course. The labor pool isn't limited domestically for many kinds of work. And for tech specifically, the labor pool is highly mobile. So if another country becomes the best place to go, then the labor pool will move there. The simple analysis probably results in, counter-intuitively, the opposite of what you want, which is a decline in the competitiveness of American tech

[mystreamlincar]

Growth has 2 parts, producers and consumers. AI might be able to take solve production due to lack of workers, but it cannot solve lack of consumers

[throwaway613746]

Terrible thigns like....cheaper housing and....higher wages.

The horror.

[ianm218]

What is your case at all? AI could usher in a post scarcity world so why not have more humans who can enjoy better lives?

You just said AI Armageddon as if there is an already predetermined ending that is widely agreed upon.

[pelotron]

I love how "post scarcity world" is tossed around as if the earth has infinite natural resources.

[ianm218]

With renewables and nuclear we have basically unlimited energy, which can solve a lot of resource related issues.

What are you concerned we would run out of?

[Daishiman]

Helium? Rare earth minerals? Having to mine ever deeper because there are essentially no easily accessible mineral deposits? The fact that mining has enormous costs and the potential to permanently destroy sources of fresh water?

[ianm218]

Rare earth minerals are not particularly rare or needed in huge quantities.

Helium is probably more limited but for most cases there is alternatives I.e. I believe people use argon.

Idk none of this seems overly pressing in terms of preventing a lost scarcity world

[iamnothere]

Topsoil (the oncoming train nobody has noticed yet)

[bombcar]

We can make topsoil; we know how, we just don't have the will.

[iamnothere]

We do know how, but it’s very slow compared to the rate of depletion.

[geodel]

Yeah, see those millions laid of last 5-10 years, everyone got better, more fulfilling jobs. Companies are falling over each other with ever more outrageous perks and salaries. Excellent healthcare, plentiful housing, unlimited education opportunities, nothing is scarce any more.

Thinking hard, the only thing we are having shortage is of AI tokens. Thats all we need to plan for or worry about in coming decades.

[ianm218]

Maybe if AI becomes deeply embedded enough in society/ government it will tell lawmakers "You should let people build housing in urban areas where there is demand" and that would be a nice step in the right direction!

[red-iron-pine]

it could. but it won't.

ai only solves labor, it doesn't solve human greed.

[yoyohello13]

Well, when we get there people can have more kids.

[i_idiot]

Well, isn't it already difficult for the not-rich to add to families? Add to that the uncertainty with income and future. Unless socialism is widely adopted, I am not sure humans can enjoy better lives especially with additional burden of kids. Hell, people can't afford homes now. I don't see a widely agreed upon or convincing positive ending. I already see (read about to be accurate) effects of AI on young graduates. I'd assume people hope for better ending, but would prepare for the worst.

[ianm218]

When people say "people can't afford homes now" your referring to places like NY, MA, and CA where people can't afford homes because the local governments have made it basically impossible to build to match the demand in the areas? I.e. Massachusetts despite being one of the most desirable places to live ranks 50th in housing production per capita.

You're not sure humans can enjoy better lives in the future? Like you think things could only get worse?

[trumpdong]

That's not a weird one-off problem with those local governments, it's a symptom of something fundamental to human society.

[InsideOutSanta]

Yeah, a large portion of this is caused by better access to birth control, anyway. This is a good signal of a society becoming healthier and wealthier and should be celebrated.

Given the constant productivity improvements, elder care is not something that can only be solved by having constantly growing populations.

[dyauspitr]

Yeah but logically unless people start matching the replacement rate at some point it’s a lot of pain until you go extinct. Isn’t South Korea supposed to be functionally extinct in less than 100 years at this rate?

[marcuskaz]

The basis of capitalism is on growth. How can you continue to grow revenue constantly if there aren't more people to buy products or use your services. Additionally tax revenue decreases as fewer people are working, so less government services and employment would be available.

Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it looks like an equilibrium issue since over time it will balance out. But those teachers who are losing their jobs are adults, tax payers, consumers now and the loss of spending has a cascading effect.

[red-iron-pine]

e.g. how do you sell 100 million smartphones when the population is only 50 million, and can hardly afford to buy 1 (and certainly not more than 1)? this leads to layoffs

how do phone shops like verizon or t-mobile stay open if people aren't buying? same for phone repair places? more layoffs

more laid off people means less people going out to dinner, ordering pizza, taking trips, buying new cars. those businesses close, and layoff people.

less workers means less tax revinue, either income tax, payroll tax, or sales tax (cuz people ain't buying shit). government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services. there are now less cops and more potholes.

how do billionaires, whose wealth depends on publicly traded companies and their stocks, keep making money when no one can buy anything? spacex and tesla can make up numbers and stay afloat, somehow, but most stocks will tank.

[M95D]

> how do you sell 100 million smartphones when the population is only 50 million

You don't. You only sell 50 million.

> this leads to layoffs

Why? 50 million people instead of 100 million also means half the employees in the factory, making just 50 million phones instead of 100.

> government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services

Yeah, but no layoffs (same reason as the phone factory). Fewer people need fewer services. Potholes are indeed a problem. Some roads leading to abandoned places will need to be abandoned as well.

> most stocks will tank

By your argument, those people that can't buy a second phone, also can't buy any stocks anyway. I see no problem here.

[marcuskaz]

The population doesn't just go from 100m to 50m instantly. It gradually changes over time, 100 years from now the smaller population will work itself out, but none of us will be alive for that. We still have 100 years of discomfort to get through.

Fewer children mean all the industries and gov't services who are employed now to service children will need to downsize, these are lost jobs now before the fewer children grow to adults where they would take over those fewer jobs. All of this will have a effect across the economy.

Pediatricians, Teachers, Toys & Games companies, Children Furniture, School Supplies, Electronics, etc.... All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize. Again in the long run it works out, but in the short run say next 50 years for people in these markets will see downsizing over time. Can the rest of the economies pick that up?

[M95D]

Pediatricians - not enough of them now. Teachers - also not enough. Toys & Games companies - can switch to adult games, no problem. Children Furniture - can and do make adult furniture too. School Supplies? Electronics? Can also switch to adult products. Fewer people means fewer companies as well - not a problem.

Lots of new jobs will be needed in health and elderly care - you just ignored those.

> All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize.

Downsizing happens all the time. It's considered normal by most economists.

Yes, there are domains that are more affected than others. Reduction in population is slow enough to simply let the workers retire without hiring new ones.

You're acting like the birth rates are 0.2 instead of somewhere above 1 (too lazy to check). I remind you that Japan had lower birthrates than that for a very long time and nothing bad happend. In fact, their workplace conditions are improving. Salarymen are finally starting to work decent hours.

Why don't you admit that you're worried about your own quality of life at 70y old and you couldn't care less about future generations and their polution, resources, global warming, famine and refugee problems?

[em-bee]

Potholes are indeed a problem

actually, less people would mean less traffic, and less wear on the roads, therefore also less potholes.

[M95D]

That's not how potholes form. It depends on wheather, not traffic.

[em-bee]

weather, mainly rain, is only responsible for weakening the soil under the pavement, the actual holes are created by traffic. so as long as there is no traffic, holes would not form. especially holes getting larger also depends on traffic.

freezing and thawing can also be an issue, but obviously only in areas where it gets cold enough.

[bombcar]

Road wear (including potholes) is almost entirely proportional to the number of large trucks.

[trumpdong]

So, the economy of scale is still there whether the finances are there or not. If I make 10 pizzas for me and all my friends, Bob fixes all our bikes, Carol goes to fetch water from the well, Dave tends the sheep, etc... All 10 of us are doing our own little economy without money and benefitting from it. What I'm trying to say is there can still be people selling pizza in a collapsed financial system, if we can somehow trust each other to deliver (which is what money does). Maybe we'll end up making our own currency.

All this relies on a basic subsistence right though, us all living in harmony on some commune. If the housing rental system remains in place and demands dollars even though no dollars are available to be gotten, then our landlord is probably going to choose to escalate to violence and won't take pizzas as payment. If the government is going to mandate rent payment in dollars without actually making any dollars available, we have a problem.

[arbll]

I don't think it's specific to capitalism. Any system needs workers to produce enough for retirees and children. If you have more retirees and less workers any system is going to struggle.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Growing, biological organisms need growth. Because once they stop growing, now they're in dying mode. It won't happen instantly, of course, but they're going to die. And it's this way with civilizations too. Rather than being one of the "disadvantages of capitalism", it may actually be a principle of life itself.

[ericmcer]

If you believe extraordinary individuals are a product of nature and we don't know how to nurture them into existence then it makes sense. Whatever confluence of events triggers an Einstein has the greatest number of chances to occur.

Either way it seems dumb to structure our entire economy and future around elder care. I guess that is what you get when people older than 60 have 65% of the wealth and people under 40 have 7%.

[phendrenad2]

People are replying that it'll lead to uncontrolled population collapse, and it'll disproportionately affect the poor. But the alternative is to keep growing the population until we run into a much harder problem to solve (water, food, climate) and then collapse. And won't that disproportionately affect the poor? And won't it be much worse, because the population will be much larger then?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon,

Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.

And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.

Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.

>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.

This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.

Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.

[ahtihn]

> Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.

At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?

Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society, kids suddenly have value again.

So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium or the population keeps swinging up and down. Total extinction seems unlikely.

[trumpdong]

When you have only a few thousand people in an area you can hunt the wild animals that are breeding more than humans. Resources will be abundant again. Today we need all this infrastructure to feed so many people as if we all just started hunting there would quickly be no deer left, but people back then could treat deer as an infinite resource, and if the future is like back then, so will they.

[geodel]

Indeed. And in context of India since that's what Economist's article is about. Having higher population growth is just insanity to me. After destroying land, water, air, forests, mountains and still barely enough for hundreds of millions souls I am not sure how population deflation can be a important concern at this point.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?

Hospitals failing. Caloric intake failing. Yeh sure, why not? Let's just imagine that all high technology that acutally props up reproductive success seriously strained or even vanishing will result in things magically correcting.

The same attitudes that have negatively impacted fertility rates don't disappear because things get worse. They're reinforced by it. An economy that collapses because there aren't enough workers doesn't make people say "I want to have babies"... if the media is to be believed, people wait until the economy improves first. Why would that happen?

>So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium

All evidence to the contrary? We've actually run experiments with animals. After they crash, the stress and trauma imposed on them keeps them from reproducing at a behavioral level despite resources being abundant.

>Total extinction seems unlikely.

Based on what exactly? Your unwillingness to own up to plainly obvious but disturbing conclusions?

>Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society,

Short of time travel, we can't have a pre industrial society, as that's the society that comes at a point in history before industry. What we'd have would be a post-collapse society. They're not the same thing. They don't even resemble each other much.

When moose on the island are nearly wiped out and their predators starve to death, the moose can "swing back up" because moose never have low fertility. It's something like 25.0, give or take. They have a low population not because fertility went low... they have it because baby moose get eaten or starve or die from disease. Once those pressures ease up, the 25.0 fertility is still there and population rises quite rapidly.

When human fertility goes down, it means that humans can't ever bounce back. So unless you're hypothesizing some sort of thing which causes human fertility to rise paradoxically and inexplicably, this reply of yours makes no sense at all. Not even a little. By the time people like you realize how wrong you are, your species will be past the point of no return.

[trumpdong]

Why do you think nothing will change in 350 years? Where were we 350 years ago? We thought population was stable back then with less than 1 billion people. Is it plausible that things will change again in the next 350? I think so. I think at least one thing changes about the world in every 350 years.

[sethammons]

This is NOT human extinction. Just the collapse of global modernity.

Why would the last group of N people not subsistence farm? "Guess we wont try to live like people have for the last x million years, here is a good place to lay down and die."

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Why would the last group of N people not subsistence farm?

Why would they be able to reinvent that, when none of their ancestors for how many generations did so? Is that something a person can do well, do you think, with no prior experience or expertise? What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?

We could ask why they could reinvent all the technologies that people from prior eras of agriculture could manage? Will they instantly be able to make their own ropes, do you think? Have you ever made rope? Does it not count as technology if it's not a transistor etched into a silicon wafer? But previous eras of history did utilized that quite a bit for their agriculture. Are they supposed to make due without? There must be a hundred different things they won't know how to do, but were necessary for agriculture in any era of history you might name, but that you can't name because you know nothing about it.

Technologies, ones so mundane that you don't even recognize they exist, permeate the world. They're lost and then they're gone because a replacement was better. But when the replacement disappears, those lost technologies don't spring back into existence magically. Civilization is "path dependent", it doesn't get knocked back to previous tiers because those previous tiers cease to exist once we've moved on to the next. And it's really hilarious to me that not only are you ignorant of this, but you're snarky about it too.

[triceratops]

> when none of their ancestors for how many generations [farmed]

Because they'd still have books and seeds and farming implements lying around? And maybe some actual farmers to learn from?

> What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?

Probably, yeah many will starve. Early English settlers in North America had very little farming experience and many died. Enough survived to build colonies.

[bombcar]

They don't need to reinvent it - the Amish are doing it right now to some variation of "Amish on a tractor" if you want.

Insisting that negative population growth necessarily means extinction is as silly as saying that positive population growth necessarily means people standing on people from coast to coast.

[sethammons]

People live in the alaskan bush. QED

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Does a full, capable, lively civilization live in the Alaskan bush? Or is just a few grizzled assholes doing it to prove that they can?

And do those assholes have enough spare time and effort and interest to raise families? Any women of reproductive age out there with them?

If not, this probably isn't the model that proves that human extinction is an unreasonable worry.

[defrost]

You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology .. moreover there are people alive still hunting and gathering.

They've not lost their skill to survive sans tech - unlike, say, yourself.

Still, if it helps you - take notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology

Actually, I know alot more about this than you do. And what you call "minimal technology" is not the case at all. Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it? Why do you think it's "minimal technology"? But if you insist it is, I take it to mean that you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands, which is silly on its face. It's not just the bronze/iron/steel work. Now we're back to "can you make a rope?"... can you? I think with an hour or two you could make something. If I brought the tool for you to use. And if you had the fiber for it. But it takes quite alot of practice to get good at it, I'll never get there. And even if you had the tool (haha, sandcast one in iron for bonus points!), and had the practice, now you're a fucking hemp/jute/sissal/something farmer just to have enough fiber to make the ropes to plow, but you're no longer growing grain so you don't need the plow. Why is this minimal technology so uncooperative, do you think? Why do you need so many fucking specialties just to do subsistence farming? Maybe you should go out there like they did 12,000 years ago with a stone hoe and plant the seeds stooped over, one at a time. I'm sure the yields will be high enough with that that humanity's numbers can start growing again instead of shrinking.

>Still, if it helps you - take notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

Cute, someone who watches video instead of reads. That's... I dunno. Maybe if you read, you'd understand how centuries ago this continent was so full of game that those Europeans who saw it were astounded, but now there's practically nothing left. Not enough to feed a recovering civilization with anyway. Even if they used firearms instead of the spear in that video. I'll even forgiven that now you've stepped back even further from the subsistence agriculture thing to hunting-and-gathering. Maybe humanity should crawl back into the ocean and become fish too... that's how we'll beat extinction.

[defrost]

> Actually, I know alot more about this than you do.

So you say.

> Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it?

What, another one? We used oxen and draught horses rather than mules.

> you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands,

I live in Australia, I know where many working old ploughs are - most of the farms here still have them on display - there are several on this very property.

> Now we're back to "can you make a rope?

Sure - been there, down that, have you?

Look, this is getting dull - I'm 70, I grew up in a remote location, my father, still alive, born in 1935, fed his family as a child while his father was away at war - I've often spent months in remote areas.

In the event of the collapse of the modern US tech sphere some humans will get by, others will not.

[imtringued]

This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.

Making rope is easier than getting the license to be allowed to farm industrial hemp.

Even if machines and electronics stop working, you can still extract their metals out of them without the effort of reducing ore from scratch. There are entire landfills waiting to be mined.

Then there is the fact that you're completely uninformed about rural life even just 150 years ago. They used very little steel tools and while the steel tools they did use were essential, the vast majority of them can be shared with the rest of the village.

Even just 200 years ago, most people lived off the land.

The idea that urbanisation turned all of humanity into a helpless class of humans is ridiculous.

The only real constraint is sufficient farm land to support a transition away from urban living, but when you think about it, even that is unnecessary, because there is no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined.

The moment you entertain even just a little bit of modern technology being preserved the argument makes no sense. The amount of power that you can capture with solar panels by far exceeds what human power and horse power can do. Solar panels are only considered inferior to fossil fuels due to the fact that you can burn fossil fuels on demand, whereas solar panels only produce during the day when the sun is out.

But that doesn't negate the fact that the amount of work solar panels can drive exceeds the work a human can do in a day. You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.

[mystreamlincar]

You need consumers to buy whatever an economy builds, regardless of AI involvement. As people retire they consume less.

[stavros]

That's the same question I have as well. We're a cancer that's spreading on the earth and we're worrying we aren't spreading fast enough. Yeah, I get that we want to support the aging population, but at this point we're doing it at the expense of humanity as a whole.

[Paradigm2020]

Instead of such generalizations which are meaningless anyway ( if you had cancer you'd get treatment to kill it, hence if you claim to be part of a cancer with the capability to kill yourself...)

Choose to be the change you wanna see in the world and find other who want to do that and stop saying "woo be us" in public as it just doesn't help.

The world is the way it is because we complain and consume too much and act & care too little. But change always starts with you and first your attitude. And then well inspire others with your actions to make this world (one of ) the best versions it can be

[willmarch]

Not having kids is choosing to be the change they want to see in the world, no?

[Paradigm2020]

Not religious at all but... "To those who is given much..."

If all they do is not have kids and claim that we are a cancer the minimum they could do is that other classic

Speaking is silver but silence is gold...

And well I firmly believe the biggest problem is the pervasive desire to be weak and complain by those who have the possibility of actual impact.

The battle is lost before it's fought and all.

But yeah we are being led by people with "inferior" visions for the world ~ Plato... But calling ourselves shit ain't gonna help it's just giving yourself and easy exit.

[willmarch]

You might not like it, but by choosing not to reproduce they ARE having an actual impact on the world (as this debate about their actions demonstrates).

Maybe we, as a species, would have better long term outcomes if we reflected more before blindly charging forward exactly as our parents did (and their parents before them).

Maybe they feel we should choose a different course and look for better/different ways of living and being as a species. There is no such thing as infinite growth, we should probably act accordingly.

[Paradigm2020]

If talking is impact there is an impact. But it makes the word kind of meaningless (a common issue).

All I know from them is their words... Which I hope we can agree where kind of negative (I personally prefer not to be a cancer hbu ?)

There is no such thing "as a species"... It's not like we are ants... Some groups of humans/individuals are net neutral, some net positive and most net negative.

The question is always about incentives and externalities... and not what we as a nation/city/... Whatever prefer but what we are willing to stop doing...

At the end of the day the world is the way it is because the people who choose the game are the ones who keep playing it.

The thing that got me with his comment is that he based on his website is relatively succesful... Unlike this fake belief that billionaires hold all the power it is in general the 0.1% that hold the power... With the consent of rhe 9.9% and he's most likely 9.9% ...

This not having kids as a noble sacrifice is just choosing to be weak tbh unless he's actually tried but if that is the case it's definitely not in public.

[trumpdong]

You are using so many words to tell a person they should just kill themselves without directly saying it. I flagged your comment anyway. I hope the moderator understands the context.

[Paradigm2020]

If that is the (logical) conclusion you come to maybe the answer is that the person should be more careful about their choice of words because of the conclusion it leads to ?

Not that I expect too much deep thinking of someone who chooses to call themself trumpdong...

[ndiddy]

The problem isn't if the population gradually shrinks, it's if there's an uncontrolled downward spiral in fertility. If the birthrate gets below a certain point, then most people won't have any experience whatsoever interacting with babies or young children in their day-to-day life, and cultural norms will shift to make childlessness the default option. This marginalizes people who choose to have children, which pushes the birthrate down even further. This has happened in South Korea, where children are barred from many public places and it's hard to find housing in urban areas if you have children because the noise they make will piss off the neighbors. The birthrate is currently ~0.7 births per woman, meaning that every 100 South Koreans will have around 12 grandchildren. Here's a good article if you're interested: https://archive.ph/bM4Ff

A few quotes:

> Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

> An artist named Daum told me that, when he was young, “if you kicked a ball into someone else’s property, you went and rang the doorbell and got it back.” That city no longer existed: “Now you get yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my window!’ ” There’s a special word for noise between floors. Complaints forced Daum and his wife, Dani, to leave their previous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t stand your children anymore!”

> In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.”

[UtopiaPunk]

Is the concern that we'd marginalize parents and kids? As a parent of little kids, that's a concern that wasn't even on my radar. I had no idea that that was a major concern of people. Wild. I'm not saying it is a fabricated or unfounded fear, I just don't have that concern at all for myself.

As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt.

My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate.

I think Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator is relevant and inspirational: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20&t=2s

Thank you for sharing your article. It's from a view so unlike my own, and it's been eye opening.

[ndiddy]

The concern is that if the birthrate drops low enough that having kids becomes unusual, it causes societal changes that create a negative feedback loop that will continue pushing the birthrate lower and lower. If the number of elderly far exceeds the number of working people (which is already locked in for South Korea), you then have to figure out how to restructure society around this while maintaining social order.

[bombcar]

You can see this in a microcosm at churches - the ones full of families and exploding children will continue to have such; and the ones that are newly wed or nearly dead will chase families with children away even if entirely unintentionally.

If it happens on a societal level it's tremendously powerful.

[Ajedi32]

Well, in the extreme case, human extinction seems like a pretty bad thing.

[kranke155]

a large organism (human populaton on earth) reaching equilibrium and ceasing to grow does not equal to human extinction... it far more likely is just a temporary contraction that will then reverse when the conditions are set for it.

[btilly]

Populations do not tend to grow to equilibrium and then stop. They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.

The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.

A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.

[Ajedi32]

> They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.

That's not what's happening here. Birth rates are below 2.1 in many countries who are no where close to "outstripping their resources". There are other factors causing the contraction which have nothing to do with resource limitations.

In fact it seems like it's the opposite: richer nations with more resources tend to have lower birth rates. That's the scary part because it means there's no equilibrium to be reached. Birth rates could, in theory, remain low until humanity ceases to exist.

[kranke155]

Has any organism ever extinguished itself as you describe ? This whole human extinction thing… isn’t that catastrophising? We are a 7-8 billion individuals away from extinction.

[Ajedi32]

All plausible theories I've heard for the cause of humanity's unprecedented, historically low birth rates are things that could not occur in less intelligent species. (Birth control, women's rights, hedonism enabled by modern technology, etc.)

> isn’t that catastrophising

Yes, I'm only putting that forward as the worst case scenario to make the point that this can't just be ignored. As I said in other comments, this almost certainly won't actually result in extinction because there are other corrective factors which would occur long before that, but none of those scenarios are particularly desirable either. (E.g. Civilizational collapse returning humanity to pre-industrical birth rates, global takeover by theocratic governments that ban birth control, etc.)

The only non-catastrophic corrective factors that sound plausible to me involve some kind of intentional collective action on our part that reverses the trend, which won't happen if everyone's attitude is the same as the root commenter's. (Granted, maybe there are other possible corrective factors I haven't thought of, but if so I'd like to discuss what those are rather than just have the problem dismissed with a hand wave.)

[btilly]

Yes. Read through https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941 to see that, given a good enough environment, mice can wipe themselves out. Here is a particularly telling passage:

Eventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden.

Like the mice, our population is going into reverse. And that description of behavior, looks awfully prescient when I compare to humans on social media today...

[trumpdong]

That means we're outstripping some kind of invisible resource that's hard to measure.

[Ajedi32]

The population is not "reaching equilibrium", it's shrinking. If it was reaching equilibrium you'd expect the births per women to be slowly reducing until it approaches 2.1 and then staying there. It's dropping substantially below that. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the contraction is temporary, the causal factors seem largely unrelated to the existing population size.

[kranke155]

How can you say it’s not temporary if it’s just started?

[Ajedi32]

Because all plausible theorized causes (birth control, global reduction in poverty enabled by technology, women's rights) are not temporary conditions. (Or at least we better hope they aren't.)

[kranke155]

Those are just hypothesis. Here’s ankther likely hypothesis - isn’t this is a mega fauna arriving at capacity?

[phendrenad2]

That's... not how equilibrium works. A self-balancing segway or robot doesn't reach the balance point and then freeze in place. There are oscillations. And it isn't a pretty sine wave either. Considering the massive number of factors that go into something like "global population growth", expect a VERY chaotic graph indeed, like the stock market, but worse.

[kranke155]

Yeah fair so what.

The argument is - our current economic system can’t handle it.

Well then that’s an argument for changing it.

[phendrenad2]

Actually I was replying to someone who said that we weren't reaching equilibrium, and I contended that we are. I said nothing about "our current economic system can’t handle it".

[trumpdong]

Maybe the equilibrium is below the current level. People didn't think the population rise would stop, either.

[calepayson]

Ya but I’m 28 and have had enough with these contractions. For Christ sake can I get a sane decade so I can actually build a career. :)

[kranke155]

its unlikely that will happen. If you read Arrighi, his hegemonic cycle narrative says that the interregnum between two hegemons is decades of chaos as the system reorganises. We seem to be heading for a US to China transition.

The last transition was British Empire to US and that was 1900-1945.

We can only hope for something better.

[calepayson]

Yay.

[AndrewKemendo]

I mean you can always be a farrier, lineman, septic sumper, cobbler etc…

What’s stopping you from being a welder or dentist?

[calepayson]

I feel like this is a joke but honest answer: I worked ocean rescue for 4 years then lived with some tech folks in sf who were making literally 5-10x my salary.

What’s stopping me? Probably some combo of wanting to one day afford a home and a family without having to move to Memphis and the a sense that I’d get bored as a welder and therefore be a bad one.

Man, septic pumper tho…

[AndrewKemendo]

Not a joke, I tried to start a trash company and be a handler on the back, but unfortunately my epilepsy got in the way

[M95D]

> some tech folks in sf who were making literally 5-10x my salary

Don't worry. It's temporary.

[BrainInAJar]

human extinction is far more likely if we keep reproducing than if we slow down. See: climate change etc

[saulpw]

Humans are the second most populous animal on the planet. We are in no danger of extinction.

[BobaFloutist]

I don't know where you got that idea, but we're not even the most populous species of vertebrates on the planet (that might be chickens).

If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.

[trumpdong]

Humans and our cattle are something like 95% of all land mammals, maybe they're thinking of that.

[saulpw]

"Land vertebrates", #1 is chickens, #2 is humans. But colloquially "animal" does not include ants or fish.

[BobaFloutist]

Insects I'll consider fair enough, but fish? Are you leaning on "fish isn't meat"? Otherwise, this isn't a colloquial use I'm familiar with.

[saulpw]

Just try referring to a fish, alive or dead or cooked, as an 'animal' to your friends. Even if it doesn't sound weird to you, your friends will feel misled in the conversation, even though it's technically/scientifically correct.

[blackoil]

In terms of biomass humans are much larger than ants.

[Ajedi32]

If the trend doesn't reverse, it's mathematically guaranteed.

But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.

Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.

Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.

[Legend2440]

It's not a problem. Go look at a graph of historical world population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File%3...

It's virtually flat for eons, and then in the last 100 years it shoots up like a rocket. We didn't hit the first billion people until 1800, but the 8th billion took only 11 years. (2011-2022)

This rate of exponential growth was never sustainable, and it's normal and natural that it's leveling off now.

[Qem]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon

> The pigeon migrated in enormous flocks, constantly searching for food, shelter, and breeding grounds, and was once the most abundant bird in North America, numbering around 3 billion, and possibly up to 5 billion.

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

[bryanlarsen]

> other than supporting aging population?

Isn't that enough? Imagine a world where a large percentage of the population are in nursing homes. A humane goal for a nursing home is 10:1 24/7. So that means 1 nurse for every 2.5 residents.

Besides that, it's all about the speed of change. Current Korean levels of population halving every generation is going to cause tremendous upheaval.

Shrinking and growing populations aren't necessarily problematic. What's problematic are populations that shrink or grow too quickly. Infrastructure adapted for N people works well for a number close to N, but not so well for 2N or 0.5N.

There aren't too many people besides Elon Musk that are significantly worried that the US's replacement rate is 1.8 compared to the 2.1 constant population level. But numbers much below that do alarm many.

[Hongwei]

Our entire social contract relies on the a redistribution of wealth from young to old. Boomer Communism, it's currently called.

If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.

If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?

[trumpdong]

Forget even the finances, the allocation of labor is a problem. Imagine 1 billion young people and they're all farmers, the next generation is 100 million young people, but they still have to feed 1.1 billion. No amount of financial shenanigans will avoid facing this basic fact.

[illiac786]

I think you’re missing the point, you’re assuming this brief moment will stop. Why would population stop declining?

[trumpdong]

sex feels good and you need a certain minimum amount of civilization to manufacture condoms

[illiac786]

Ok, so civilisation collapse first. Ok, then I agree.