Also, it’s more talking about it on a theoretical level, not one of actual necessity anytime soon. We know how to fix the short-term demographic issue: immigration. Increasing the birth rate will only become an actual necessity well into the future if it ever does; the demographic issues in much of the industrialized world are a self inflicted problem.
Nah. The fears are more about the effects of an aging, dwindling population on the economy, our ability to care for the elderly, and on social stability, as well as what measures governments are likely to take to solve it once they really wake up to the problem (I expect the more authoritarian ones will at least ban abortion and contraception, and may try banning education for women and encouraging child marriage if that doesn’t do the job.)
Also, as someone who had a child later in life after being convinced that I didn’t want one, I can’t help thinking a lot of people are missing out on an important and fulfilling part of life because they happen to live in an anti-natalist society, one in which attitudes to children were heavily influenced by those books you mention. And that’s sad.
How could that possibly be the case? California, with a population of ~40 million, has 6 million college dropouts per year? That doesn’t remotely meet the sniff test, but in any case CA has around 2.5M college students total. Probably Wendell_Wagner is right that this includes people that drop out multiple times for various reasons, but even that doesn’t seem like remotely enough to get to 6 million.
The link seems highly dubious in other ways. Supposedly, 32.9% of students drop out each year, but Computer Science has the highest dropout rate at 10.7%.
I think ( and it’s not particularly well written ) it means that there were a total of about 6 million people in California who had some college but no degree. When you go further down this page you find this
- 5,830,613 California residents are SCNC.
- New California dropouts make up 6.6% of the nationwide SCNCs.
- College dropouts who go back and complete their degree in California make up 7.4% of the national completer population.
- 2,444,324 students enrolled in college in California in 2022-2023.
- 15.8% of all college dropouts live in California.
- 29,841 SCNCs under 25, 63,736 SCNCs 25-34 years old, 31,725 SCNCs 35-44 years old, and 19,875 45-64 years old re-enroll in college after dropping out.
SCNC means “some college, no credential” which I assume means people without any degree.
It couldn’t mean 5,830,613 California residents dropped out in one year (and it doesn’t give a year) if 2,444,324 students were enrolled in 2022-2023.
California may not be the best state to look at for this info because of their tech industry. It’s not too unusual for a CS hotshot to drop out and join a startup or hot tech company. And that can often be a smart financial decision for the dropout. After a few years of working, their employment prospects are much more about their portfolio of work and technology they know rather than whatever degree they have or don’t have. The dropout effect may be the same for other fields in CA, as these tech companies need people to do marketing, sales, etc.
That’s certainly plausible, but it doesn’t support the argument made in the thread, since almost 10M Californians have at least a bachelor’s degree. So the actual final dropout rate (not counting momentary interruptions, etc.) is well under half.
That’s all fine, but how can the overall rate be 3x as high as the max individual rate?
I think the page is just confused. They make these two statements:
32.9% of college students drop out each year.
According to the latest data, 32.9% of students in undergraduate degree programs drop out.
Wait, is it 32.9% per year, or 32.9% over the course of a program?
I think that’s a window that is slowly closing a bit as Silicon Valley becomes more generically “corporate”. These days you can get by without a degree if you have the industry cred, but you’re not getting nearly as many opportunities to build cred without one as you used to. It’s just like the slow creep of MBAs slowly becoming de rigeur to make it into management that spread across the country in previous decades.
But that definitely was a thing for the previous generation. I had an acquaintance that did just that, dropping out of college after just a year or two and becoming a highly sought-out startup software engineer for a variety of new endeavors. He was surfing from one to another every few years hoping to make it rich on stock options ( as opposed to just comfortably well-off from his fat salaries).
Wow. No. You completely misinterpreted your linked article, although the article went out of its way to discourage such misinterpretation.
The study found that having children correlated with slightly increased life expectancy, not that it caused slightly increased life expectancy.
As other posters have noted, the causality might have gone the other direction (i.e., being more healthy, and consequently more likely to live longer, might be one of the factors inclining people to choose parenthood). Or both effects might be the result of a separate cause (e.g., mental illness or other instability might both increase the chances of an early death and decrease the chances of finding a partner to have children with).
But you can’t just infer a causal relationship from the existence of a correlation.
I’ve been thinking about this, wanting to mull it over instead of doing one of those shoot-from-the-hip posts.
So, yeah, when we contract, reduce our population, cultural traditions and shared understandings can’t just replicate in order to survive; they actually have to communicate, to knit together with those who were previously Others.
It can be done democratically. Or at least I happen to think it can be. I think that ought to be a higher political consideration than I think it tends to be viewed, but yeah, the most democratic communication possible, the most egalitarian in structure and all that.
Like (probably) most of you here, I thought we were basically on a slow progressive trajectory. Constantly impatient for the lack of vision or momentum I thought ought to be connected with it, but yeah at least we aren’t moving in the wrong direction overall. Well now we are.
Some of the overall situation doesn’t change. It’s still all about egalitarian communication. How to bring folks together. Shrinking our population and being really egalitarian about it isn’t an easy project.
You’re still missing it. It comes down to basic economics. How can a society possibly take care of their elderly when each generation is 1/3 the size of the last?
They can’t. Either the elderly work until they die or they live in dismal poverty (and, somewhat surprisingly to me, the elderly already have a high poverty rate in SK). No amount of “egalitarianism” can change these basic facts. We do not yet live in a world where material needs can be taken care of by robots or replicators.
SK is almost certainly destined for an unpleasant collapse. As with so many other things, perhaps their biggest contribution will be to serve as a warning to others.
Society is resilient enough to deal with a slow decline. What SK has is not slow.
Fewer people means less food needed, less of other resources. Get rid of the entire money system, end of “how can society take care of elderly” — there’s no scarcity, just a stupid system based on the notion thereof.
Trump is now floating the idea of a one time payment of $5,000 per childbirth.
First, I need to acknowledge my earlier failure to recognize that declining birthrates actually are on the conservatives’ radar.
Second, it ought to be pretty clear that five grand isn’t much of an incentive when children cost more than that annually. I guess it could be a net positive if it actually increased the birthrate enough to justify the $20 billion annual treasury outlay. But I don’t think it will have a substantial effect and is basically just another oversimplistic “solution” offered up by a guy known for them.
I have not read every post in this thread, but has the question of “why isn’t 8 billion enough for you?” been answered yet?
Yes. Yes it has.
No, that’s absurd. People produce and consume services differently at different stages of their life. The way it works in every civilization ever is that the youth take care of the old. And in an advanced civilization like our own, the old consume a lot. They live longer than before and they have high demands for medical services and other things.
You are acting like the population goes down in the same proportion for everyone, but it doesn’t. You end up with far fewer youth (i.e., producers) compared to the old (consumers).
If nothing is done to restore this difference, then physical reality will restore it. Medical services and other things the old need will degrade because there aren’t enough people to work on them. They’ll die early because there simply not enough resources.
If you’re happy with the equivalent of shoving grandpa out on the ice floe because the tribe simply doesn’t have the resources to drag him along everywhere, that’s your choice, but I’d rather live in a civilization where people can enjoy retirement and also doesn’t require enslaving the youth to take care of them.
Yes, this. Our technology just isn’t good enough for us to hand everything off to the machines, we need people to actually produce products and services. Including those used by the elderly.
Now, that doesn’t mean we need to keep using our exact system unchanged; there’s a vast amount of room for improvement. Or just change. But simply announcing “get rid of money, there’s no scarcity” will work as well as any other attempt create a utopian society by declaring that reality works the way the believers want it to; with disaster when reality fails to be persuaded.
I’d like to correct this a little. The way it works is that young and middle aged adults take care of children and the elderly. Infants and those approaching death often consume a lot of resources.
The old living longer doesn’t necessarily mean an axtended period of high costs. My grandmother didn’t need nearly as much care as a school child until she was 94, for instance. And one of the benefits of modern medicine is that people are staying reasonably healthy longer. Not every person, of course. But a lot of people.
Ways to adapt to the changing age distribution include expecting people to work longer. They include distributing work so that the moderately old, who can no longer work a demanding full-time job, are nonetheless contributing to the fuctioning of society.
We have socialized a lot of the costs of caring for the elderly, and really haven’t socialized the costs of caring for children. I’m sure that’s part of why the birth rate is down. Some elderly are expensive to care for. 100% of children are expensive to care for.
And we are no more going to cover the full cost of caring for children than we are going to eliminate money and just give everyone what they need.
So in addition to increasing immigration from places that still have population growth to places losing population, I think we need to think about what else we can do to share the workload in a realistic way.
I’d add that, at least in America, there’s that massive problem of being screwed for nearly fifty years when it comes to health care. When you’re a minor, in theory at least you can fall back on Medicaid. When you’re elderly, there’s Medicare. In the great middle of life, there’s practically no real safety net. Nothing that could prevent problems from happening because preventive care in most forms is non-existent and that is before questions of how accessible and affordable it is anyway. That sort of precarity isn’t really great for taking on long term commitments like children.
Medical services are a big factor but not the only thing. My parents are retired, but they still live in a nice house, pay for pool/yard service, go out to eat, go on trips, and so on. They are continuously making use of services provided by the working age population. None of this could happen if the working age population isn’t there. They could, of course, stop doing these things, and would if the costs got too high. But take enough of these luxuries away and eventually you get to eating canned beans in a single room.
You are right that there is some level of adaptation possible that isn’t completely awful. Retirement at 70 isn’t the end of the world given that people are relatively healthy these days. But only so much can be done.
A friend was laid off as a programmer and worked for a few years at Trader Joes. He was pretty happy working there, with fewer hours, less stress, and a lower paycheck than he’d had as a programmer. (He also had a pension from his programming job, that eventually kicked in.) Several friends with small kids get most of the daytime childcare from their parents, who retired from paid employment, but continue to be of significant economic value. There are lots of jobs that make fewer demands on an aging body than what people might have been doing at 20, and fewer demands on an aging brain than what that same person may have done at 50, but are still helping to run the economy and produce value in the world.