I’m sorry… I’ve turned this over in my mind, but I can’t make logical sense of it.
I concur. Less people is better.
But the population isnt shrinking rapidly.
Yep.
But if we do want more families that today arent having kids, the answer is- free prenatal care, and afterwards. Free child care up until school age.
This can be done-
Right.
Which is why wilderness areas and National Parks are such treasures. But too many see only profit there and would happily destroy the little that is left for short term gains.
It’s time delayed. The birth rate could go to zero and there wouldn’t be significant effects for a while. But there will be an effect later.
You can go wild on your credit card spending at the beginning of the month and pretend there’s no problem. But you will have to pay the debt eventually.
Learn how to read a population pyramid graphic if you want to understand which countries are in the most trouble.
There’s a false dilemma being pushed here; that the choice is between “more people and high technology”, and “give up advanced technology”. While there’s certainly a minimum number of people needed to sustain a high-technology civilization, we are already well over that number. That’s why we’ve had one for some time, after all.
There’s no reason we couldn’t have a lower - not higher - population and still have more advanced technology than we have now; if anything it would be easier since we’d have more time to try to advance past our resource depletion issues before society collapses from them. Making our problems worse isn’t going to make solving them easier.
Are kids more expensive than the elderly? Well they eat less. A standard tool of demographers is the dependency ratio, the sum of the share of young and old - those 15 and under and those 65 and older. By that metric, are we headed towards disaster? Not really.
We’re below the peak set during the 1960s. Am I complacent? No. My vote is for, “Not clear, needs more research, but it’s prudent to have brakes as well as a gas pedal.”
This is why all successful factories pay off the fire marshal to let them stuff in as many people as can be physically crammed into the available space.
Er, wait a moment. That’s not how the world works at all…
True. The argument that we need more people to invent ways to produce the resources to support more people and mitigate the environmental impacts from more people is rather like the Trumpoltroon crew taking credit for the stock market going up when they stepped partway back from their tariff insanity.
And as i think i said above, it’s not just the number of people who matter. It’s people with resources. Resources like Capital and tools to measure and tools to manufacturer and the ability to calculate. Stuff that poor people from poor nations can acquire by immigrating to wealthier countries. That effectively increases the potential productivity and inventiveness of the world.
Let’s look at the countries with the highest dependency ratios:
| Country | Total | Children | Elderly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Niger | 109.5 | 104.1 | 5.4 |
| Mali | 98.0 | 93.1 | 4.9 |
| Somalia | 96.3 | 90.6 | 5.7 |
| Chad | 96.0 | 91.1 | 4.9 |
| Democratic Republic of the Congo | 95.4 | 89.5 | 5.9 |
| Angola | 94.5 | 90.2 | 4.3 |
| Uganda | 92.3 | 88.5 | 3.8 |
| Burundi | 91.0 | 86.4 | 4.5 |
| Mozambique | 88.4 | 83 | 5.4 |
| Burkina Faso | 87.9 | 83.4 | 4.5 |
Wait what? Yes: the countries with the highest shares of people too old or too young to work have very young populations. They are poor.
What about the top ten elderly ratios?
| Total | Children | Elderly | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | 69 | 21 | 48 |
| Finland | 62.4 | 25.8 | 36.6 |
| Italy | 57 | 20.4 | 36.6 |
| Portugal | 55.8 | 20.3 | 35.5 |
| Isle of Man | 58.6 | 23.6 | 34.9 |
| Greece | 56.1 | 21.3 | 34.8 |
| US Virgin Islands (US) | 66 | 32 | 34 |
| France | 62.4 | 28.7 | 33.7 |
| Germany | 55.4 | 21.7 | 33.7 |
| Bulgaria | 56.6 | 23 | 33.6 |
A 2010 report forecasted these elderly dependency ratios for the US:
2020 28
2030 35
2040 37
2050 37
That looks potentially manageable, though I expect politics to continue to shortchange kids.
Kids don’t get pensions. Kids don’t expect to each live in their own separate home with all the mod cons and bills to pay, and own their own car. Very few kids have expensive-to-treat chronic illnesses, while almost all the elderly do eventually. Also, kids can’t vote for parties that offer to give them more money.
Sorry. Most people believe that the way we live now is the best possible way to live, and that we should strive to keep living this way. I disagree. Babale is a prime example of someone who cannot imagine any other kind of successful and happy lifestyle, and who imagines that we spent 300,000 years in utter misery before technology delivered us. My opinion is that this view is incorrect, to say the very least.
To be clear, I’m sure it was fine for them. They didn’t know any other life. They probably didn’t spend much time thinking about how much it sucked. Now that we know life doesn’t have to be a constant struggle for survival, an ever present battle to the desth with diarrhea, or coming flip levels of child mortality, I don’t know why we’d go back, though.
Anyways, as the father of two kids, you will never convince me that I’d be better off in a world where I only had a 25% chance of them making it past 5 years old. I’m frankly stunned that anyone would try to pawn that society off as better than ours.
To be fair, there aren’t only two choices here. No one wants to go back to pre-modern levels of child mortality, but that doesn’t mean some aspects of hunter-gatherer life weren’t more conducive to human happiness. Adapting modern lifestyles to make people happier is totally doable. More focus on family and community vs paid work and personal achievements is likely one way to achieve that, which would fit with the subject of the thread
All I can do is hope for a moderate way in between the extreme positions advocated by you and him. Trust women, protect choice.
Both children and the elderly “age out” of dependency. But most adults over 65 don’t need someone to change their clothes or wipe their bums. And i don’t think we have greatly increased the amount of time the elderly are truly dependant, in the way small children are.
Some combination of expecting many of the healthy elderly to contribute economically in some way (in traditional societies, that’s often child care, when adults stopped being able to efficiently hunt and gather) and increasing immigration should be plenty to manage this in the US.
I looked up the cost of nursing homes: this website says it averages £65,832 per year for residential care, and £80,808 per year for dementia nursing care.
https://www.carehome.co.uk/advice/care-home-fees-and-costs-how-much-do-you-pay
Meanwhile full time nursery costs about £15,300 for a child under 2.
It’s not really comparable, because even full time nursery only covers working hours; the majority of care is still done by the parents unpaid. If we used the same model for the elderly, I guess it would be cheaper, but possibly even more of a burden for the working age population.
We 100% have to learn to live with a stable and long-lived population rather than a continuously rising one, so yes, later retirement ages, and more part-time and volunteer work by people retired from their main careers, needs to be part of the solution regardless of anything else.
My ex sister in law used to work for McKinsey, and she was encouraged to try to become a partner. She looked at the partners, and the only woman with kids whose husband also had a job had 3 full time nannys. The daytime nanny, the evening nanny, and the weekend nanny. The parents did the night shift.
So i think your fees for simple nursing care (which includes room and board, as well as care) are comparable to fees for child care.
And most retired people don’t need nursing care, of course.
If you want to try to calculate out figure out the fraction of those classified as elderly in those nursing homes and the fraction of children in “nursery.”
Neither of my parents were ever in either. My FIL was never. Any my 89 year old mother in law in now has, to date, lived independently. Recovering from acute illness (urosepsis and appendicitis at the same time) and currently in a rehab hospital, to be determined if she will go back to living independently from here. But up to 89 without it.
My WAG is that more of us will live longer without significantly increasing our period of infirmity at the ends of our lives.
No data on that at the moment though.
And even old people who need some assistance don’t necessarily need it 24 hours a day. I have a really large family ( like my mother had 40 first cousins large) and out of them, one person was in a nursing home for a few months , two lived in an assisted living facility for a year or so and two had home attendants for less than 24hr. The rest just lived with or near their kids - they didn’t need help with bathing, dressing or using the toilet just with shopping/cooking/cleaning etc. Most of them are no longer with us but except for the three who lived in facilities, they all either died at home or after a short hospital stay , even the ones who lived into their late 80s and 90s.
My aged MIL lived her last 4+ years in an “independent living” facility. not really different from student living arrangements on / around most US college campuses. She had a 1 bedroom apartment with kitchen & bathroom. The facility had maid service, a rec center, and activities. Plus a restaurant that fed everyone 3 meals per day. Plus limited transportation.
That cost the same price as the 2br ordinary apartment she had the previous 8-ish years. Plus her previous grocery & utility expenses that she no longer had.
Economically it was a dead wash to live on her own or live in Independent Living with a nurse on call, other people around for some sense of community, 3 square meals a day, etc.
There is a huge difference between a “nursing home” for somebody who is bedridden and can’t feed themselves, versus independent living for people too doddery / arthritic / blind to readily cook or clean for themselves.
The former can be dreadfully expensive, but very few people live very long in that situation. They either die soon or recover soon. IL is not that way.