[HN Gopher] The demographic future of humanity: facts and conseq...
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The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]
Author : akyuu
Score : 53 points
Date : 2025-08-11 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sas.upenn.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sas.upenn.edu)
| api wrote:
| Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he
| continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not
| sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this
| wrong and still have credibility.
| profstasiak wrote:
| how is Paul Ehrlich linked to the original post?
|
| what is he wrong about?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury
| fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen
| starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of
| starvation) that large portions of the third world would
| collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent
| this starvation was extreme population control measures
| placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things
| like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve
| completely to death with no aid). He believed that the
| sustainable population for the planet was one billion.
|
| He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use
| in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing
| highly influential people say "we are going to breed
| ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme
| curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly
| influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves
| to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of
| rights."
| api wrote:
| Unfortunately a lot of people are now saying we need
| extreme curtailing of rights -- largely womens' rights --
| because of underpopulation. The answer to every panic is
| always curtailing of rights. Scary thing may happen
| therefore we need big alpha ape to fix it for us by bashing
| people on head with big rock. Grunt, grunt.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Right this is what I am saying. And I think that we
| should be _outrageously_ skeptical of such people and
| oppose them with fervor. In the 70s people were saying
| that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a
| large portion of the world based on geography in order to
| prevent future catastrophe. These people were wrong in
| every possible dimension and has we listened to them we
| would have committed a world-historic evil.
|
| Similarly, we are starting to see people say that we need
| to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of
| the world (this time based on gender) in order to prevent
| future catastrophe. I suspect that these people will be
| wrong in every possible dimension and that if we listen
| to them that we will be committing a world-historic evil.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit
| brutal oppression against a large portion of the world
| based on geography in order to prevent future
| catastrophe.
|
| What is this referring to?
| pearlsontheroad wrote:
| In the 70s, under IMF guidance, several governments of
| 3rd world countries implemented policies of mass
| sterilization.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Erlich (and others) said that we needed to do the
| following
|
| * programs of mass sterilization in the third world
|
| * a "triage" program where we partition the third world
| into "savable" and "unsavable" zones, block all movement
| between these zones, and expel the unsavable zones from
| our world order such that they will simply all starve to
| death.
| api wrote:
| It was all very very racist.
|
| I kinda think this answers the question as to why these
| ideas get a pass: they offer a way to be racist and
| advocate racist eugenics policies without admitting you
| are racist, even to yourself.
|
| I see racism in the population collapse panic too
| unfortunately, at least in the popular discourse around
| it. Overpopulation was always about too many of the
| "wrong" people while underpopulation is about not enough
| of the "right" people.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Paging rayiner: I believe his dad was involved in
| population planning for the Ford Foundation in BD.
| rendang wrote:
| Which people are saying we need to curtail womens' rights
| because of underpopulation?
| api wrote:
| It's a huge theme on the secular nationalist right. Visit
| Xhitter for 5 minutes.
| Animats wrote:
| India got there on overpopulation. Total fertility rate
| around 6 in 1965. India does not have enough water for its
| population.[1] China would have hit similar problems if not
| for their one-child policy. China managed to avoid the
| overshoot when medicine starts to work but the economy
| hasn't developed yet. India didn't.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_India
| FredPret wrote:
| If you have access to the sea and to uranium you can make
| all the freshwater you need, even recycle your own
| wastewater nearly infinitely.
|
| This is a technological and economic problem, not an
| overpopulation problem.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Erlich did not say "there will be scarcity." Erlich said
| that there would be hundreds of millions dead to
| starvation.
| FredPret wrote:
| The modern-day Malthus, except so much worse, because he had
| the example of Malthus but chose to ignore the lesson there
| retrocog wrote:
| This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the
| social welfare state.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Social welfare state will still exist, it'll just be more
| costly as drag than it is today (in the US, ~$1.1T/year of
| uncompensated caregiving occurs, for example). Capitalism is
| more the challenge, it's built on squeezing the aggregate
| working age population for profits, and that cohort is in
| terminal decline over the long term. Between global sovereign
| debt load [1] and the demand for future profits (slides 31-33
| of this PDF), there will be sadness as the future has less and
| less humans to saddle these economic burdens on. Such are the
| breaks when you predicate a socioeconomic system on never
| ending growth, and growth is over because humans globally (for
| various complex and interwoven issues) are choosing to have
| less children or no children.
|
| [1] https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt ("Global
| public debt surpasses $100 trillion in 2024.")
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| A tfr of 1.7, the welfare state will be costly but exist. A
| tfr of .73 like korea has? Long term, that's 1 20 year old
| and 3 45 year olds taking care of half a baby, 7 70 year olds
| and 10 95 year olds
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It is what it is. You do the best you can with what you
| have.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| That depends very much on how technology progresses during
| coming decades. If we get something like AGI, then having less
| working age people may be a good thing, because there will be
| much, much less demand for white collar workers at least.
|
| In the mid 2000's when I was a kid, at school I was taught that
| there would be a HUGE labour shortage once certain large
| generations retire, as younger generations are much smaller.
| Guess what, they retired a decade ago, and yet my country has
| the second highest unemployment rate in EU, with a very weak
| job market for fresh graduates in particular. Increased
| efficiency & automation ate all those jobs, nobody was hired to
| replace many of the boomers who retired. I doubt the future
| will be any different.
| seydor wrote:
| societies and states have been doing fine without welfare for
| centuries
| bondarchuk wrote:
| "doing fine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
| XorNot wrote:
| The sheer confidence with which someone working a white
| collar desk job posts this in the AI age is astounding.
| Arainach wrote:
| The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk
| of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will
| continue until people's ability to afford rent and children
| improves.
| api wrote:
| The thing that collapses in a negative population growth
| environment is passive earnings from interest and asset
| appreciation, retirement, and to some extent social welfare
| states. The whole idea of things like social security is
| predicated on a growing population paying for the elderly. It's
| also very, very bearish for things like real estate long term.
| We are probably still in a real estate bubble.
|
| I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless
| I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in
| my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall
| about this since I was in my twenties.
|
| I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and
| it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like
| climate change and natural resource depletion.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Social security is solvent for at least the next 75 years if
| the US removes the payroll cap on contributions from wage
| income. We choose not to. The economic resources exist for
| these social programs, it will just diminish profits (the
| horror /s). It's a policy choice.
|
| Every year total fertility rate remains lower than
| replacement rate further locks in the fertility curve, but
| there is no political will or desire to implement the fixes
| required. So, we keep kicking the can until we cannot
| anymore. It's unfortunate. Demographic destiny comes
| regardless, as each year total fertility rate continues to
| fall.
|
| https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-
| on-...
|
| https://www.pgpf.org/article/social-security-reform-
| options-...
| rayiner wrote:
| By 2075, Medicare and Social Security will reach a over 14%
| of GDP combined, up from around 8% today. To pay that,
| we'll have to raise taxes by $1.75 trillion using today's
| GDP figures. That will require just about doubling payroll
| taxes from the present level.
|
| That's probably an underestimate. As population shrinks,
| GDP will shrink as well, unless we have large gains in
| productivity, which have stalled. It's not clear to me that
| the projections about SS/Medicare as a percentage of GDP
| account for the effect of GDP shrinking due to population
| decline. CBO assumes a stable population through 2060,
| using quite arbitrary assumptions about immigration:
| https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I agree with your observations. The future will not be as
| bright as the past, the population boom was already
| squeezed for the gains. Immigration at the levels needed
| to change this are unpalatable to most electorates, and
| with total fertility rate dropping across the world, it's
| important to be mindful that net migration to Earth is 0
| (slide 39). As the economic future deteriorates due to
| the ever increasing drag of these obligations, I'd expect
| total fertility rate to continue to decline at present
| rates (if not slightly accelerate). This creates a self
| reinforcing feedback loop. A "Demographic Doom Loop" [1].
|
| Happiness is reality minus expectations.
|
| [1] https://x.com/KenRoth/status/1753526235173450213 |
| https://archive.today/rY4WG
| variadix wrote:
| The welfare state has to collapse before people realize
| children are their retirement plan, and that there's no
| guarantee the government will take care of them in old
| age.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| There is no guarantee your children will take care of
| you. Walk through any nursing or care home and speak with
| residents, ask the last time a child saw them.
|
| _One quarter of adult children estranged from a parent_
| - https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-
| room/4104138-one-qua... - July 19th, 2023
| Qem wrote:
| > There is no guarantee your children will take care of
| you
|
| On the flip side, for those childless, it's completely
| guaranteed none will.
|
| > One quarter of adult children estranged from a parent
|
| That sounds like a 75% success rate.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| doubtful 75% is all high quality. The one quarter is
| probably all really bad, then some of that 75% is bad
| enough that it won't make much difference. Probably 25%
| is so into their parents that they will actually take
| care of them.
| rayiner wrote:
| All that said, I agree with your general point that the
| situation with the welfare state is probably fixable, if
| we don't enter a doom loop. It's just more burdensome
| than lifting the SS cap.
|
| I'm more optimistic about non-western countries. I
| suspect descendants of Puritans will be a historical
| curiosity in 2500 but I think Muslims and Mormons will
| still exist.
| rayiner wrote:
| Rent is the bigger issue than affordability per se. My wife
| pointed out the other day that we had our second and third kids
| shortly after we stopped living in apartments and bought a
| house. We didn't plan to have a significant age gap between our
| first (who we had in law school) and our other kids, and we
| earned a lot of money the whole time, it just happened that
| way. She's convinced that having the extra space subconsciously
| encouraged us to have more kids.
| angmarsbane wrote:
| I've been encouraging my cousin who desperately wants
| children to have them in her two bedroom apartment but she
| feels that she needs to have a house first and she and her
| husband can't afford one. They're in their late 30s. My
| partner and I are mid-30s planning to have young children in
| our 2 bedroom apartment, we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO
| NOT EXIST in our Los Angeles neighborhood. More space means
| untenable commutes which brings more complicated childcare
| logistics (can't get to daycare before it closes, less time
| with kids etc).
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| This totally ignores the fact that the decline in fertility is
| measurable across the globe in the poorest and wealthiest
| nations in the world. It's clearly not a simple matter of
| affordability...
| seydor wrote:
| Poor countries reproduce more, it's not same everywhere
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Look at slide 3 again ("TFR around the world").
| seydor wrote:
| those are not the poorest countries (e.g. no african
| countries are listed either)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| _Our World in Data: Fertility rate: births per woman_ -
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-
| woman?t...
|
| _To the surprise of demographers, African fertility is
| falling_ - https://www.mercatornet.com/to_the_surprise_of
| _demographers_... - September 19, 2024
|
| > Previously in this space, under the heading "Africa
| Rising?" yours truly cited The Lancet's latest population
| stats on sub-Saharan Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa is the
| world's only region with an above-replacement total
| fertility rate (TFR), currently estimated from 4.3 to
| 4.6. They've gone from 8 percent of global births in 1950
| to 30 percent in 2021, headed to 54 percent by century's
| end. While the region's TFR is falling fast, any sub-
| Saharan population contraction is at least a century out.
| However, according to Macrotrends, Africa's TFR (4.1) has
| declined an average of 1.3 percent annually over the last
| three years. Should this trend persist, Africa will
| eventually plunge into below-replacement territory.
| Demographers believe fertility decline is accelerating
| faster than projected, especially in sub-Sahara Africa.
| Statista, the European aggregator of figures, projects
| Africa's 2030 TFR at 3.8.
|
| _Fertility rates fall as education levels rise in sub-
| Saharan Africa_ -
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d44148-025-00026-3 -
| January 29th, 2025
| seydor wrote:
| yes those are true but the fact remains that despite the
| falling rate, sub-saharan TFR is 4.5, while brazil is
| 1.6, iran 1.7 etc. The correlation of TFR with wealth is
| a fact
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Brazil is 1.47, and Iran is 1.43. Both are lower than the
| United States.
|
| Other poor countries lower than America: Mexico,
| Columbia, Philippines, Thailand
|
| Source for TFRs: https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/67E402B
| 3A81D9/media%2FGxYAq...
|
| The correlation between wealth and fertility is quickly
| breaking down, both between countries and within (rich
| people have more kids, poor people have fewer).
| vixen99 wrote:
| 'hoarding more and more of the wealth'. Sounds very much like
| you believe in the pie fallacy. A zero sum game? Maybe that's
| not what you meant though.
| Arainach wrote:
| The pie has nothing to do with it.
|
| The tide is rising and most ships are sinking. Productivity
| in the last 40 years has skyrocketed. The gains have
| overwhelmingly gone to a tiny minority while everyone else
| has seen rent, food, education, and more go up dramatically
| faster than wages. This has accelerated in the last 15 years
| and has destroyed any faith in the social contract.
| jocaal wrote:
| The pie isn't always growing and the pie isn't always static.
| There are times where either can happen. I think people are
| just feeling that we are entering a period where the pie will
| be stagnant for a while. In the short term the world might be
| a zero sum game.
| cyberax wrote:
| The drop in fertility rate is directly liked to migration into
| dense cities. They are just not a good place to have children.
|
| The US resisted the fertility drop for much longer, because of
| higher suburban population.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > The US resisted the fertility drop for much longer, because
| of higher suburban population.
|
| It was immigration, but next generation of all immigrants
| (native born) adopts host country total fertility rate in
| this context.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2019/08/08/hispanic-...
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2016/10/26/5-facts-a...
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/08/FT_19... visually nails this.
|
| Now, would these people have had a higher birth rate if they
| remained in their LATAM countries? The data indicates no.
|
| _Latin America's Baby Bust Is Arriving Early_ - https://www.
| bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-22/latin-... |
| https://archive.today/EPMAU - May 22nd, 2025
|
| _Population Prospects and Rapid Demographic Changes in the
| First Quarter of the Twenty-first Century in Latin America
| and the Caribbean_ - https://repositorio.cepal.org/server/api
| /core/bitstreams/dc5... - 2024
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| This is probably a factor, but I think it's a mistake to
| treat cities not being suited for raising children as a hard,
| immutable fact. They're bad because rent continues to soar
| which clashes on two fronts (kids are expensive already _and_
| increase space requirements) and we as a society have decided
| to build our urban spaces (suburbs included) to be explicitly
| not friendly to children, families, or anybody not driving
| and to instead favor adults with money to spend. These are
| things we could change, should we want to.
|
| The other thing to look at is why people have migrated into
| cities, and the answer is pretty simple: it's where the good
| employment prospects are. The further yet get away from urban
| cores the worse those get: fewer jobs, worse compensation and
| benefits, greater risk of being stuck between jobs for long
| periods of time. Anybody worried about birthrates should be
| embracing remote work and making sure they compensate their
| employees well.
| rangestransform wrote:
| I read some unsubstantiated claim about cities being bad for
| fertility because there's an abundance of things to do that
| aren't popping out children
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| While I generally agree with this and am angry at "the elites"
| who seem to both want increased fertility but also don't really
| target it in their companies ... I think the bigger unspoken
| issue is really the TFR skew. Global fertility can go down for
| a while and it isn't disastrous. TFR skew results in large
| problems if the least progressive and poorest groups
| systematically have much higher TFR over extended periods.
|
| None of the solutions I can think of are very appealing or even
| tolerable. It really feels like it's a matter of carrying on
| and having hope. But perhaps we could start by merely
| describing the data and the situation.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > will continue until people's ability to afford rent and
| children improves.
|
| National fertility rates don't correlate with any measure of
| average income. The only thing that does is the average number
| of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn't
| causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all
| income and education levels.
| jmclnx wrote:
| This is all well and good, but population dropping will only
| impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only
| because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living
| fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact.
|
| Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping.
|
| The much larger worry should be _Climate Change_ , a dropping
| population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But
| right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole
| lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the
| population falling.
|
| Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it
| drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling
| resources.
|
| EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look
| at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was
| the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start
| paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big
| fear, the rich may have to start paying more.
| Qem wrote:
| > For the poor, it will have no real impact.
|
| It will likely bring back the problem of old age destitution as
| rule, not exception. It's a previously common scourge that
| never went completely away[1][2], but went into the sidelines
| by early-mid XX century, and is set to coming back with a
| vengeance, by the time current people in their 20s-30s reach
| old age. It hits the poor hard.
|
| [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/successful-educated-but-
| no...
|
| [2] https://citizenmatters.in/mumbai-abandoned-destitute-
| elderly...
| baron816 wrote:
| The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable
| home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines,
| refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to
| come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child
| care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children
| later in their lives.
| seydor wrote:
| if we have all those robots doing everything for us, why do we
| need children?
| coldtea wrote:
| If we have all those robots doing everything we are we
| needed?
|
| We could just kill ourselves, since we don't seem to care
| much for life, reproduction, and all that.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The mid-century Baby Boom came after WWII, and probably had
| very little to do with technology. The upswing started some
| time in late 1944 to mid 1945 as combat was winding down in
| Europe and a lot of young men were returning home. Otherwise
| fertility has been declining steadily since 1800 in western
| countries.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| No, this is exactly the opposite of true: you need to do more
| reading about the baby boom. It happened across many
| countries, including ones which had little involvement in
| WWII, and in almost all cases it began in the 1930s, even
| with the Great Depression underway. It got supercharged by
| the end of the war because that's when the economic doldrums
| finally ended, but upward trend in fertility predated even
| the beginning of the war, never mind the end.
| baron816 wrote:
| See https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-
| boom-wh...
| lynx97 wrote:
| Late child birth is not about fertility but about risks for the
| child. The only woman I know (yeah, anecdotes) who attempted to
| delay getting a child until after her 40th birthday got a baby
| with down syndrome. I know what living with a disability in our
| world means, from personal experience. And given that
| experience, I have a hard time giving these women some slack. I
| think they are risking the well being of their children just
| for their own selfish reasons. We are humans, and there are
| limits to what we can do. We need to accept them, or we will
| make other people suffer.
| bArray wrote:
| > Don't we care about output per capita?
|
| Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply
| flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per
| capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down.
|
| > Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual
| welfare but...
|
| > our ability to service debt and social security obligations
| depends on total output.
|
| Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely
| depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP
| basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1
| million people, and add another million people (of the same
| distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt,
| but both delayed. It's not that complicated.
|
| > We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change
| anytime soon.
|
| It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide
| are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are
| no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer
| of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond
| purchases, indicates this.
|
| > Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
|
| This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup
| making a loss, such as the UK's pension system.
|
| > Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor
| countries harder.
|
| Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less
| for their original country. What do we think that does to the
| original country on scale? What do we think that does to their
| growth?
|
| > Affordable housing:
|
| Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are
| not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children
| makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of
| our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're
| measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Little mention of automation in the labor discussion. Also, no
| real discussion of the consumerism aspect of the economy when
| talking about worker productivity.
|
| Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and
| will be a slow decline.
| rayiner wrote:
| The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to
| understand:
|
| > Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
|
| According to an Economist article addressing data collected by
| Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial
| benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle
| East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at
| every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-
| immigration-in-...
| lynx97 wrote:
| Intuitvely, those opposing immigration have always known this.
| But tell that t someone from the left They will verbally kill
| you for stating obvious facts.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Intuition alone really isn't to be trusted with public policy
| decisions of this magnitude.
| rayiner wrote:
| I agree, but shouldn't the burden be on the people
| advocating mass immigration to prove it helps?
| Analemma_ wrote:
| No, because freedom of movement and commerce
| (specifically, selling one's labor) are human rights. No
| right is absolute, but the burden of proof is on the
| person claiming the consequences of exercising these
| rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
| rayiner wrote:
| There is no "human right" to cross national borders. It's
| the opposite. International law recognizes both the
| collective right of "peoples"--groups of people--to form
| nations, and the right of nations to their territorial
| integrity.
| Arainach wrote:
| Over what timespan? This analysis isn't elaborated at all. Does
| it count the impact of companies being able to pay lower wages
| and paying more taxes? Does it account for the future
| generations? Etc.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's explained in the link. Figure 2.7. It covers immigrants
| and their descendants across all ages. Here's further
| analysis of the same data:
| https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/01/immigration-
| economics-f...
| silverquiet wrote:
| Why are the demographics of a small Nordic nation something
| "everyone" should understand? Whenever I've pointed to how well
| the social safety nets work in these countries and how they
| could be an example for the US, I've been told that the US is
| too different of a country to draw an analogy.
| rayiner wrote:
| Denmark has been the most systematic about collecting this
| sort of data about immigrants from different places. I
| suspect you'd see similar results in the UK and Canada if
| those governments collected the data. Canada's GDP per capita
| has actually started declining recently.
|
| I think Denmark's welfare system is a model, so whoever
| you're arguing with, it's not me. I will point out that, if
| Denmark with its robust welfare system can't integrate MENAPT
| immigrants effectively, that doesn't bode well for other
| countries with less efficient welfare states.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What is MENAPT here?
| efkiel wrote:
| Middle East, northern africa, pakistan
| silverquiet wrote:
| Net cost to a national government and GDP per capita are
| not the same thing. Presumably these people become more
| productive by moving to more developed countries; that's
| the general reason that people immigrate to particular
| places. My impression without looking at the data is that
| US GDP per capita has continued to increase despite large
| (called a crisis by Republicans) numbers of immigrants
| during the Biden Administration. And given that these
| people are not citizens of the US, presumably they will not
| be eligible for all benefits granted to citizens which
| would decrease their cost to the government.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| You realize different kinds of immigrants go to different
| places? Do you think that immigrants from Bangladesh are a net
| cost at every country they go to including Pakistan?
| jhp123 wrote:
| Progressive taxation will generally mean that anyone under the
| median income has a negative net impact on the government's
| finances. All this study is doing is reflecting the obvious
| fact that immigrants are by and large working class.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Denmark has shown a rather pronounced distaste for integrating
| people into the workforce whose names signify non European
| origins.
| Animats wrote:
| The future is probably a society with more robots than humans.
|
| We can see this happening now at Amazon. Amazon is a good case to
| watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on
| close to a one to one basis. Right now, Amazon has about 1.5
| million human employees, and 1 million robots. Amazon reached
| peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then
| human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to
| increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had
| increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were
| worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.
|
| How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's
| coming anyway.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-
| part-o...
| robots0only wrote:
| The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a
| quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just
| move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that
| actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than
| 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to
| B).
|
| Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-
| driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like
| robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more
| and more automation.
| Animats wrote:
| The simple Kiva mobile platforms are most of the robot count,
| but they replaced large numbers of people who did walk around
| warehouses moving stuff from A to B.
| rangestransform wrote:
| IIRC Amazon laid off the entire team that was working on
| manipulation research at the Boston area Amazon Robotics
| pasquinelli wrote:
| they should form a union
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm
| kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents
| died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly
| living off their state pension.
|
| As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or
| the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower
| fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the
| previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree,
| too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7
| more years to reproduce.
|
| I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It
| is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people.
|
| We're currently trending towards a birth rate of 1 or less.
| This means 4/5 will be retirees in three generations.
|
| Your 1/3 figure is wildly optimistic. Little chance it will be
| that good.
| XorNot wrote:
| A substantial realignment in the economy is what's coming. The
| charge will be when the rate of vacated homes starts to uptick
| as their aren't enough capable people to live in them: right
| now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand, but those
| retirement figures imply a different reality as time goes on:
| eventually those people start going into care facilities, but
| their won't be nearly enough people around to supply the demand
| for the properties they're finally moving out from.
|
| The real markets are absolutely not ready for that reality.
| chockablocker wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk
|
| Recorded talk for the slides in this post.
| rendang wrote:
| The selection effects of this transition will be really
| fascinating to see after the fact. The species has spent a long
| time under selection pressure for "having more kids", but is
| being subjected for the first time to "having more kids while
| extreme prosperity and modern telecommunications exist" which is
| a very different thing.
| api wrote:
| I had an evolutionary bio professor in college say this: "you
| don't understand evolution until you understand how
| contraception could lead to overpopulation."
|
| Anything placed in the path of reproduction is a barrier to be
| overcome.
|
| If there is _anything_ in the human genome that correlates with
| a positive desire to choose to have children, we are selecting
| _hard_ for that right now. We may see a bottleneck this century
| and then a gigantic population explosion next century as a
| result, with a world full of people with very loud "biological
| clocks" who just adore and crave babies.
|
| That is assuming this is genetically determined enough to be a
| target for selection. There are probably correlates that are,
| and I could speculate endlessly about what they are, but I also
| know that such speculations are likely to be wrong because
| these systems are complex and often counter-intuitive.
|
| One I've speculated about recently is negativity bias. It seems
| to me that a lot of people choosing _not_ to have kids right
| now are doing so because of negativity bias, because they see
| the world as a terrible place as a result of their consumption
| of negative media. Historically negativity bias may be
| something that 's been selected for, but this may now have
| flipped. Optimists may have higher fitness now while pessimists
| did pre-industrialization and pre-modernity. But again,
| speculation.
| Zacharias030 wrote:
| What do you / your prof think about the timelines though? I
| always heard people shoot these kinds of arguments down by
| saying that evolution does not significantly operate on our
| accelerated timelines of human technology.
| api wrote:
| How long an evolutionary change takes can vary widely
| depending on a ton of factors: current makeup of the gene
| pool, strength of selection, whether it's a single or
| multiple gene trait, whether and to what extent there are
| counter-pressures selecting in the other way, and so on.
| It's very hard to say.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population
| numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable.
| Fertility _and_ total population are all wrong.
|
| The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite
| imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean _none_ -- that it
| actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in
| the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country
| is probably closer to 10M.
|
| You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And
| take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M),
| rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its
| population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai.
| (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and
| roughly an order of magnitude larger.)
|
| Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the
| same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite
| imaging.
|
| Then there are obvious economic measures, etc.
|
| The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are
| _maximally_ unreliable. There are various reasons for this that
| we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers,
| etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.
| testing22321 wrote:
| I drove right around Africa through 35 countries over three
| years. I drove across both Nigeria and the DRC.
|
| There are dozens and dozens of massive cities that take hours
| to cross in Nigeria you've never heard of. Anecdotally, it's
| way, way, way more populous than anything nearby. Ethiopia felt
| somewhat similar in parts, as did Egypt.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Can you name a few of them in Nigeria? On satellite imaging,
| from what I've seen, they're not so massive, and they're
| mostly comprised of a sprawl of 1-3 story buildings.
|
| We can compare vs. cities that we have good numbers for. Or
| Chinese/Indian cities, for that matter. (After looking at
| Nigeria or the DRC, a quick glance at India via satellite
| imaging is _shocking_.)
|
| That said, Egypt is very populous, there's no doubt about
| that one.
| testing22321 wrote:
| I drove through at least 10 cities in Nigeria I've never
| heard of that had tons of buildings over 10 stories. I just
| took the fastest route across, I didn't go wandering. This
| was 10 years ago too.
|
| Also remember the DRC is almost a million square miles. So
| it's 1.5x Alaska.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this:
| https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de...
|
| Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions
| about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples
| the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the
| theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also
| an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers.
| It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather
| than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the
| creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone
| regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places,
| social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings,
| stay-at-home parents, and more.
|
| And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological
| procreation imperative, we as a species are _wired_ to breed. For
| all the whining from puritans about pornography, I 'm of the
| opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects
| a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and
| live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the
| individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families,
| and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work
| > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at
| all costs.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential
| crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn
| of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological)
| children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age,
| how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was
| suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me
| _panic_ ". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to
| ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so
| massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I
| have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational)
| biological impulse to procreate.
|
| But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me
| that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex,
| which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of
| activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens
| (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation
| creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that
| sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the
| incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be
| parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the
| role of sex, and the importance of family, in society.
|
| Just some rambling, don't mind me.
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