There are a ton of unchallenged assumptions in this thread. Chief among them is that social services of any form are some universal law of nature. They can and will be modified as demographics and productivity per capita vary. Globally, the population is expected to grow to 10.3 billion over the next 50-60 years. So the issue seems to be localized birth rates.
I think folks in the 1980s weren’t really thinking of higher order effects of what happens to societies in general when localized birth rates are divergent.
And 64 countries, most of Europe as well as China and Japan, are already past peak population.
My prediction is that global warming will lead to a billion deaths over the next 50 years, so the world’s peak will be sooner and lower. And also drive production down worldwide so that the world will have fewer resources to combat the deaths.
The Boomers aging out of the work force invested in themselves. They will be fine. They did not care much about leaving a sustainable legacy and we are faced with little political control to fix it.
I can’t blame them. Their entire lives they’ve been the target market for everything product under the sun and now political existential fear is their product of choice.
Why do you feel climate change will lead to a billion deaths? Do you feel it will be due to the wet bulb temperature, famine, fresh water shortages or something else?
When the wet bulb temperature hits poor parts of asia, that is going to be terrible.
This isn’t meant to be a hijack, but it does tie into fears of overpopulation. I don’t personally think w will see a billion deaths, what I think will happen is we may see mass migration, and mass change of how people live (cities will become almost deserted as people stay indoors during daylight summer hours). Also there will be mass adoption of AC.
Possibly, but one good thing about solar power is it produces energy during daytime hours when people will need AC the most so hopefully that will reduce the carbon intensity of AC in the decades ahead.
That’s already been noticed in my city. Last year we had a heat wave, and their were concerns about the power grid, but so many homeowners have added solar panels that feed into the grid that they didn’t have a problem. Because there was also a lot is sunshine sitting that heatwave.
This is never in dispute. Whatever your feelings are about whether providing social service is a legitimate role of government, many societies have formed dependencies on this assumption, and the collapse will be tremendously disruptive.
Moreover, however you feel about the government’s role here, the fact is that someone will need to do it, or many children and elderly will go without adequate food, medical care, or shelter. Sure, you can say “the family should take care of it”, but for every family member who stays home to care for another family member, that’s another worker subtracted from the labor force, and another wage subtracted from population of consumers. It’s less of everything for everyone.
I don’t like making predictions about the future. The straight line predictions - even if fitted onto a curve - are historically disrupted by black swans or what Asimov called the “Mule,” events that could not be forecast. Nobody here is factoring in black swans; the implicit assumption behind the statements is that somehow population decline will be gradual due to falling birthrates.
One example of a disruptor is nuclear war. We’ve avoided it for 80 years because the consequences have always been globally unacceptable. Talk today is of a nuclear race because Trump’s insanity is removing the global shield of deterrence. All bets are off if this happens.
We can escape nuclear holocaust, but not global warming. Portions of the world are already flirting with unlivability. The global ice caps are endangered: seaports and islands will be flooded. Glaciers are wiping out populations. Droughts and floods are eliminating fertile areas for crops and animals.
A conservative estimate is that a billion people need to move or die. That number is a guess, to be sure, but it gets peoples’ attention. The worldwide detestation of mass immigration will block most or all of those billion. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Death.
Part of it IMO is it was always a “Lowering the birthrate is needed for thee (3rd world countries), not for me (1st world/Western countries)” mindset. When the opposite is the trend, people get panicky.
Another black swan is a (serious) pandemic. Think something as contagious as covid but as deadly as ebola or HIV or rabies.
The 1918 flu pandemic had mortality rate similar to covid, but it mostly killed otherwise healthy young adults. Covid, despite the disruptions, was a fairly minor pandemic. We could get far worse.
I honestly have no idea if a declining birthrate would help or hurt during such an event, but i bet there’d be a population surge when it ended.
I think future population growth rates are extremely hard to predict.
The 70’s/80’s panic was mainly about a growing population consuming scarce resources. Both the growth rate and resource scarcity turned out to be overblown.
The current panic has some legitimate point as far as degrowth being economically challenging, but it’s mainly the managerial class worrying about the share of workers, with a side of white people worried that nonwhites are going to replace them.
So the latter anxiety about “the wrong people are reproducing too much”, it’s mostly the same as it ever was. Except back then they were worried about Africa and Asia eating all the food, and now they’re worried about them taking all the jobs and gaining too much political power.
It’s partly that. It’s partly that while a gradual drop in population is, according to a lot of people including me, desirable, a rapid drop is likey to cause serious societal problems; some of which may result in serious damage not only to individual humans, but also to society as a whole and the environment.
Yeah, pretty much this.
Yup. That’s a major problem.
Yeah. I wonder sometimes about the Old Order Mennonites and similar groups here. They were such a tiny percentage of the population to start with that it isn’t noticeable yet except in really limited localities — but that population is expanding fast, and so far, at least, they’ve got quite a high retention rate.
They’re pacifists, and generally very good neighbors. But they’re not big on anything I’d call science based education.
And yet we’re going to have to figure out economies that work with, at least, stable populations. Because a world wide economic system that relies on everything, population included, expanding every year forever is insane. No ecology works like that. No species works like that. What some of them do is expand and crash, expand and crash (and occasionally crash into extinction, something else taking over.) What some do is to continue for extraordinary periods of time, but not by continually expanding; sharks haven’t taken over the world, or even the oceans, because there simply aren’t more sharks every year for as long as there have been sharks. What others do is to transmute into something else. We need to transmute into something else; or else the coming crash is going to be really nasty. I have my doubts that we’re going to pull it off; but I think we ought to try.
I’ll also point out that it seems to me that some here are equating the results of ‘stable or slowly declining’ with the results of crashing. There’s ground that exists, at least potentially, inbetween. I hope we can manage to land on it.
Go back further and you can see 19th/early 20th century comics (I can’t recall the ones I saw were late Victorian or early Edwardian) about the wrong people reproducing when it was the working class/poor having too many babies and the middle class woman fending off the stork with a parasol (that comic stuck in my head for some reason). Birth rates have been declining in the US ever since the 1870 cohort of women according to this paper with the aforementioned exception of the baby boom era (which was after 15 years of horrible - 20+ years for the farmers). People, as whole, were certainly not getting poorer through all those years. I admit, I’m having trouble reading figure 1, though, so I may be misunderstanding it. And it’s not always an absolutely even trend, of course.
Are/were “welfare babies” really a thing– that for people nearly completely dependent on welfare anyway, having children isn’t as much of a burden as it would be for middle-class working parents?
Poor people have always had more babies, welfare or not. In fact, large families were welfare - among other reasons, people had lots of kids so that they’d have someone to look after them when they grew old.
Whereas rich people had fewer kids, so as not to split the principal.