Human history is full of this ridiculous hand-wringing over nothing. some people don't actually do shit, just sit around pointing fingers and nitpicking. They skip the real work of digging into social change and fixate on surface-level bullshit.
The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over regular people and kills their vibe for having kids. And in poorer countries, it's solar panels and TikTok exploding everywhere, giving way too many fun distractions to keep things lively. But the real root of it all? It's baked into the political systems and setups. Still, barely anyone wants to face the music and admit their "great" democracy and any other policical system is straight-up trash.
This article just flat-out refuses to face the real damn problem.
Either you're banking on robots to save the day, or you gotta crank up the birth rate. But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better. Thing is, none of those are any more doable than hoping robots magically fix everything.
For a lot of woman in "somehow develoed countries" the labour market is today more attractive than the "marriage market" as women rights etc. give them much more freedom than it was in older days (e.g. in some EU countries the woman had to ask their spouse if they allow them to work up into the 70s).
If you are for women rights etc., then you have to accept that this includes much lower birth rates (as having childrend is not the only way to survive).
Birth rates are only up in countries without any social development of women rights.
> But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better.
Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism (including capitalism-inflected feminism that idealizes careers, which is pretty much all mainstream feminism).
Under the current system you exist to be maximally exploited to increase profits (ideally consuming all your capacity, including that which you'd use to reproduce and raise children), and childcare (socialized or no) is a foolish attempt to solve that problem with more of the problem (and of course that doesn't actually work).
The solution is a system the allocates a significant fraction of everyone's labor to cultural continuity (reproduction, child-rearing, and civic engagement), which would require a significant re-ordering of priorities.
Beware of explaining everything with one reason, and I certainly noticed the tendency of contemporary Americans to explain everything with "capitalism".
It doesn't really fit the picture. Capitalism is about 250 years old and most of that time it correlated with a massive population explosion, not a collapse. The current world also isn't uniformly capitalist. Socioeconomic conditions and systems differ across the globe, but the collapse seems to be nearly universal.
There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school and we mostly eliminated teenage pregnancies in the developed world. Which is likely better for the socioeconomic level of the now-not-mothers, but it also has negative biological effects and sank the overall birth rate in a non-trivial way.
What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy. That is a very small subset of "capitalism", though.
No, it wont:
Population statistics are among the most robust & stable one and one with the most accurate data that we have across the globe.
Populatoin statistics are running reaaaallly slow - on that one day when you see the decrease in the graph, it is already too late.
>Does that mean we are doomed to die out? Henry Gee thinks so, if only because all species die out in the end. The question is simply how long it takes.
Why isn’t this the default position?
The most firmly predictable position is that every biological species will go away eventually. Even humans are vastly different chimeral species from the proto-humans that made up modern anatomical human.
Most europeans have significant Neanderthal genetics, and yet all Neanderthal are existinct. Same with homo denisovian, habilis, etc…
As a species working on transitioning human level intelligence into something that can last longer than human species should be our only goal.
If we're going by "all species die out in the end" then anything we transition to will die too: entropy will get the whole universe in the end. Past that there's nothing that says any species can't expand out, settle whatever planets they want and stick around to the end. I'm also pretty cool with my millions-of-years-from-now descendants looking back at me and thinking about how different they are from me. I would consider it an incredible success to go that long without catastrophically destroying ourselves.
stage right enter homo paganicus, accompanied by those twins homo philosiphus and homo philobaccus
pass the wine around.
True story, I took a course in environmental microbiology, and at a certain point, the instructor had a slide titled, "Ideal Conditions for Reproduction" and below that the words, "A Swiss Chalet on a cold night, a bottle of wine, and a warm fireplace"
The one thing many people miss - or utterly fail to acknowledge - is how the entire edifice of capitalism is violently against any attempt to reverse fossil fuels, simply because it is far too profitable to turn away from. And when you realize that the only responsibility corporations have is to their shareholders, it makes perfect sense.
It’s why CO2e levels continue to accelerate, why heating has similarly accelerated such that we might see more heating in the next 10 than we have in the last 75, and why we are still on the absolute worst-case-path-possible, all because of “business as usual” being too profitable to ignore.
We’re fucked, not because we aren’t doing anything, but because those who can are the 1% who aren’t, and those who actually want to do something are the 99% who have absolutely no power to affect the former.
Natural selection has been strongly optimizing for pro-natal genes and cultures since the introduction of the birth control pill. The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.
> Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time.
They are "plummeting around the world at the same time," they just didn't start plummeting everywhere at the same time.
> The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.
Except Africa can't fill the gap for everywhere else, and if immigration is the "solution" then what do you do about Africa after it's been sucked dry of its prime labor force? Just leave all its poor elderly to die on their own?
https://archive.today/r8ZP5
Human history is full of this ridiculous hand-wringing over nothing. some people don't actually do shit, just sit around pointing fingers and nitpicking. They skip the real work of digging into social change and fixate on surface-level bullshit.
The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over regular people and kills their vibe for having kids. And in poorer countries, it's solar panels and TikTok exploding everywhere, giving way too many fun distractions to keep things lively. But the real root of it all? It's baked into the political systems and setups. Still, barely anyone wants to face the music and admit their "great" democracy and any other policical system is straight-up trash.
This article just flat-out refuses to face the real damn problem.
Either you're banking on robots to save the day, or you gotta crank up the birth rate. But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better. Thing is, none of those are any more doable than hoping robots magically fix everything.
For a lot of woman in "somehow develoed countries" the labour market is today more attractive than the "marriage market" as women rights etc. give them much more freedom than it was in older days (e.g. in some EU countries the woman had to ask their spouse if they allow them to work up into the 70s).
If you are for women rights etc., then you have to accept that this includes much lower birth rates (as having childrend is not the only way to survive).
Birth rates are only up in countries without any social development of women rights.
> But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better.
Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism (including capitalism-inflected feminism that idealizes careers, which is pretty much all mainstream feminism).
Under the current system you exist to be maximally exploited to increase profits (ideally consuming all your capacity, including that which you'd use to reproduce and raise children), and childcare (socialized or no) is a foolish attempt to solve that problem with more of the problem (and of course that doesn't actually work).
The solution is a system the allocates a significant fraction of everyone's labor to cultural continuity (reproduction, child-rearing, and civic engagement), which would require a significant re-ordering of priorities.
Beware of explaining everything with one reason, and I certainly noticed the tendency of contemporary Americans to explain everything with "capitalism".
It doesn't really fit the picture. Capitalism is about 250 years old and most of that time it correlated with a massive population explosion, not a collapse. The current world also isn't uniformly capitalist. Socioeconomic conditions and systems differ across the globe, but the collapse seems to be nearly universal.
There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school and we mostly eliminated teenage pregnancies in the developed world. Which is likely better for the socioeconomic level of the now-not-mothers, but it also has negative biological effects and sank the overall birth rate in a non-trivial way.
What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy. That is a very small subset of "capitalism", though.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines: No.
I remember the freak-out of the 90s. The world was going to be at 10 billion humans and unsustainable, leading to world-wide famine.
Now we're at the other end. It will cycle, the human race will continue.
No, it wont: Population statistics are among the most robust & stable one and one with the most accurate data that we have across the globe. Populatoin statistics are running reaaaallly slow - on that one day when you see the decrease in the graph, it is already too late.
>Does that mean we are doomed to die out? Henry Gee thinks so, if only because all species die out in the end. The question is simply how long it takes.
Why isn’t this the default position?
The most firmly predictable position is that every biological species will go away eventually. Even humans are vastly different chimeral species from the proto-humans that made up modern anatomical human.
Most europeans have significant Neanderthal genetics, and yet all Neanderthal are existinct. Same with homo denisovian, habilis, etc…
As a species working on transitioning human level intelligence into something that can last longer than human species should be our only goal.
If we're going by "all species die out in the end" then anything we transition to will die too: entropy will get the whole universe in the end. Past that there's nothing that says any species can't expand out, settle whatever planets they want and stick around to the end. I'm also pretty cool with my millions-of-years-from-now descendants looking back at me and thinking about how different they are from me. I would consider it an incredible success to go that long without catastrophically destroying ourselves.
stage left exit homo economicus
stage right enter homo paganicus, accompanied by those twins homo philosiphus and homo philobaccus
pass the wine around.
True story, I took a course in environmental microbiology, and at a certain point, the instructor had a slide titled, "Ideal Conditions for Reproduction" and below that the words, "A Swiss Chalet on a cold night, a bottle of wine, and a warm fireplace"
With that attitude you are
The one thing many people miss - or utterly fail to acknowledge - is how the entire edifice of capitalism is violently against any attempt to reverse fossil fuels, simply because it is far too profitable to turn away from. And when you realize that the only responsibility corporations have is to their shareholders, it makes perfect sense.
It’s why CO2e levels continue to accelerate, why heating has similarly accelerated such that we might see more heating in the next 10 than we have in the last 75, and why we are still on the absolute worst-case-path-possible, all because of “business as usual” being too profitable to ignore.
We’re fucked, not because we aren’t doing anything, but because those who can are the 1% who aren’t, and those who actually want to do something are the 99% who have absolutely no power to affect the former.
Natural selection has been strongly optimizing for pro-natal genes and cultures since the introduction of the birth control pill. The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.
> Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time.
They are "plummeting around the world at the same time," they just didn't start plummeting everywhere at the same time.
> The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.
Except Africa can't fill the gap for everywhere else, and if immigration is the "solution" then what do you do about Africa after it's been sucked dry of its prime labor force? Just leave all its poor elderly to die on their own?
Natural selection doesn't optimize, it selects.