It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.
Look at COVID for instance, not the first novel coronavirus infection, it only took days to go from "maybe it is like the other ones that infected a few thousand people" to "everyone on the planet will get it", because the start of the curve looks the same.
It takes a long, long time for new ideas to diffuse through society. Most people are not paying close attention to the cutting edge.
This might also be one of those things that aligns with people's experience of the world, and the de-population thing is inherently counterintuitive unless you are, by definition, outside the norm- that is, you would only ever notice this if you live where people already don't live. (rural Japan, etc.)
I've not heard anyone talk about an overpopulation problem in 30 years.
My peers who are skipping kids are mostly doing so because their other ambitions don't align with raising a family, which I totally get. It's a huge trade off, I hope it'll be worth it.
They do talk about whether the earth can sustain that population as a reason not to have children. They are correct to. Their children might be the generation who have to explain to their children what fish tasted like.
They often list overpopulation as a reason. But yes, it's not the only reason they give.
As an antidote to this kind of mindless negativity, just consider whether any individual human is happy to have been born. It seems very clear to me that most people enjoy being alive and so having children is moral on utilitarian grounds.
It was never proven wrong, as much as the world changed in a way that invalidated it.
The entire idea was that population growth was an exponential function, whereas agriculture output was a linear function. There would have been famine if nothing had changed, because there is only a certain amount of physical labor a person is capable of doing, which has to be divided between the farming, logistics, and cooking of the food.
What happened was that a century later we got mechanized farming and synthetic fertilizer, decoupling agricultural output from the population. Now a single person can do the work of thousands, and every year that number grows due to technology advances. It is too expensive to set up fully automated farms on the industrial scale, but it is technologically possible.
But none of that invalidates his idea. If you believe that an exponential function and linear function sharing a point at (0,0) must cross each other (subject to other reasonable conditions like not having crossed yet, the linear having a positive finite slope, etc), then it is not logical to reject Malthus. It just no longer applies because we decoupled our food production capacity from the population size.
It's also not just that we accommodated explosive populations but that eventually birth rates really did simply start slowing down for discernible reasons that future models were capable of integrating. Even if we continue to have technology that would give us the capacity to accommodate future increases in population, those increases are no longer happening.
I suppose I would separate out some of the more extreme predictions about demographic collapse in Russia or China. I'm not sure what to make of those or if they're similarly credible to other kinds of population forecasts.
Sometimes the trends of tomorrow just aren't in the data of today.
What modeler in the late 19th century, when children were still economic assets on farms and in factories, could have predicted they would become extraordinary economic liabilities?
If you’re vague enough about it, you can never be wrong! And if you’re overly specific and have a modest following of rubes with more money than sense, you can take some of it! A lot of it!!
Now that I have a kid, there is doom over population shrinkage
Sadly this will be used by propagandaists to doubt scientists
Why is that sad? What other conclusion could you draw from the facts?
You say "complex systems" but are actually referring to human behavior.
Humans are unique in that they change their behavior in light of predictions. You can't make a prediction, and publicize that prediction, without changing the system.
From what I've heard, many people are declining to have children precisely because of the environmental effects of overpopulation. There are of course other factors, but that's one factor.
Der letzte macht das Licht aus.
When actually given the choice, many women are choosing not to have children, for good reasons. E.g. disruption of careers, physical effects on the body, being tied to a partner, financial drain.
Until we face up to both these issues, demographic collapse will continue - humanity will simply evaporate.
If a subgroup actually has children at above replacement, then as the other groups shrink, they will be a larger and larger fraction of the population.
Both commit the fallacy of assuming present trends remain in place indefinitely and ignoring technology.
They also both tend to be racist. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.
Well, there are people that think the idea of preserving cultures itself is racist (well, at least western ones), or that there is no detrimental effect to an existing culture by enabling mass migration.
You think if, say tomorrow, all 1.4 billion citizens in China were teleported into the U.S., that there would now be 1.7 billion Americans, indistinguishable from the Americans that came before? Or, would it simply be 1.4 billion Chinese, alongside ~300 million Americans (if we're being generous...)?
Demographics and culture are obviously intrinsically tied, each individual migrant holds beliefs and values that have been forged and shaped over the span of the lives that they have lived in their country of origin. This is, and has always, been the case, its just more of a hot-button issue recently because:
A: We are currently getting an overwhelming amount of migration to stave off our own demographic issues, so the strain begins to have a more noticeable impact,
and B: Many of the migrants (from abroad) are coming from countries with cultures intrinsically incompatible with values Westerners have come to expect in their own countries (See: Sharia Law as contrasted with Women's Suffrage), so they stick out somewhat like a sore thumb when advocating to enact such policies and practicing such cultures.
And there's all kinds of value prejudging that is entirely external to the data about what cultural change means, what it implies, what effects it will have, all of which involve disputable and extremely politicized assumptions that are trying to borrow from the objectivity of population data for rhetorical momentum in favor of specific preferences of racial composition.
South Korea's birth rate is indeed dangerously low and threatens their economy. If they cared they could do something about their extreme workaholism and cost of living.
As far as immigration destroying the culture: it depends on the rate. A healthy but limited rate of immigration revitalizes cultures, but it's pretty clear that sudden mass immigration is dangerous and causes a lot of problems and backlash.
Speaking of fixing problems... if our billionaire class who seem so worked up about birth rates wanted to do something about it they could also address the most frequently cited problems preventing young families from forming. Like housing prices.
If we really get into a situation where dangerously low birth rates are threatening the economy and social stability, the boring solution is to do what we do for other goods and services that the free market isn't adequately providing: directly subsidize it. Pay people to have kids. The easy way would be a payment or tax rebate to married couples with 0 children to have one child. But that's the boring solution that doesn't involve massive reactionary cultural transformations, so the right-wing "problemists" won't like it.
Edit: by problemism I mean people who use a problem as a lead-in to push only one solution, and they're not actually interested in solving the problem unless it's their solution. An example from the left side of the spectrum would be Marxists for whom any solution to climate change that doesn't destroy capitalism is unacceptable, or anarcho-primitivists or anti-tech trads for whom any solution that doesn't involve shutting everything down is unacceptable. In reality the solution to climate change is to emit less carbon, and physics doesn't care how we do that or what political system we are using.
There's a lot of right-wing problemists for whom any solution to excessive population decline that doesn't involve taking rights from women and re-introducing reactionary theocratic or nationalist structures isn't acceptable.
South Korea is currently throwing money at the problem, upped parental leave even did some things to make it easier to retire if you got a lot of kids. I'm almost certain these things won't meaningfully change the situation (maybe go from 0.8 to 1.0) as all korean children are expected to get good jobs (white collar, certain professions) , they structure their society towards this and it's impossible to get a high birthrate like this.
I actually read about how something like presence of nuns in your town in italy was quite correlated with birthrates as it basically relieved all women but the nurses of some duties. In Korea you can see how the stability leads to a very significant effect on birthrates as Sejong is by far the highest birthrate region. Interesting since those really obsessed about birthrates also seem to hate the worker protections that make it difficult to fire people. I guess housing is another of those stability factors since renting really ups the risks of children.
Politicians in the 70s were selling us the 3 days work week and retiring at 50 thanks to "automation", I fail to see how the "robots will solve all our problems" logic is any different.
Scott's conclusion (written in 2019, a year before GPT-3 was published) is perhaps more interesting today than it was then:
> In other words, the singularity got cancelled because we no longer have a surefire way to convert money into researchers. The old way was more money = more food = more population = more researchers. The new way is just more money = send more people to college, and screw all that.
> But AI potentially offers a way to convert money into researchers. Money = build more AIs = more research.
> If this were true, then once AI comes around – even if it isn’t much smarter than humans – then as long as the computational power you can invest into researching a given field increases with the amount of money you have, hyperbolic growth is back on. Faster growth rates means more money means more AIs researching new technology means even faster growth rates, and so on to infinity.
> Presumably you would eventually hit some other bottleneck, but things could get very strange before that happens.
>In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026.
Set your calendars!
Pretty sure that's the point of the comment you're replying to.
What remains of humanity will be safely cocooned inside the biomechanical membrane between the chaotic outside world and whatever environment the compute prefers. The perspiration of its leviathan breaths and a circulatory system that pumps coolant will ensure the temperature differential.
Like how single cell organisms were engulfed into multicellular organisms, so shall our descendants be engulfed. Countless immobile interconnected bio-systems with humanity as its ancestor. They'll less adaptive than us but more optimally specialized. I wonder how recognizable humanity would be when we're tessellated into one large interconnected amalgamation. Furthermore, I wonder how many generations we have left where we'll still need a face and outward looking eyes. Skin cells don't need flagella after all.
I mean, of course. I also worry about French Revolution and WWII less then people who had to live it.