Meanwhile the world population has reached 8.2 billion and is still rising. There are plenty of people out there. Just not the kind of people that those in power want.
This is why immigration is so important to the economy of a developed nation. You bring in families from around the world, give them amazing opportunities, then hire them to take care of the elderly and keep the lights on. Instead, our nation is trying to shut the door like a lone hoarder living in a pile of rotting trash.
Caregiving is an amazing opportunity. It is life-changing for the person receiving the care. It is fulfilling and soul-affirming for the person delivering the care.
If people agreed with your view that it's an "amazing opportunity" then nursing homes wouldn't be catastrophically understaffed.
Of course that doesn't take away from anyone's enjoyment of that line of work, it is truly important, but it's not something that the vast majority of people see as an "amazing opportunity".
America is great at underpaying and overworking almost everyone for almost everything. America is really only good if you're a decamillionaire or better. In general, it tends (YMMV) better to be in Europe for poorer/average folks who get much more value and protections while paying more taxes.
>> Caregiving is an amazing opportunity. It is life-changing for the person receiving the care. It is fulfilling and soul-affirming for the person delivering the care.
That the market doesn't pay well for the work is immaterial to its value.
If you're agreeing to everything they said, and only disagreeing that it pays well: yes.
Yes? That's what makes something a broadly recognized "good opportunity" in our current economic system that you can base public policy around. Everything else is just variable personal preference.
People don't leave their home countries and entire lives behind because they're looking for the "opportunity" of nursing a foreigner for a pittance. They do it because they want to make good money and provide for their families.
Around 20% of US elder care facilities will close around 2027 because of the Medicaid cuts that pay for long term care of many to pay for the tax cuts for the rich. It was cynically set to take effect after the midterm elections so people wouldn't realize what was happening.
For the people in countries that still have a high birth rate, they usually are amazing opportunities. Wealthy countries are a lot richer than poor ones, and people will take jobs we scorn.
Unfortunately, we also scorn the people who would want to do them. We set very low immigration limits, and we pay the people who do those jobs (even native ones) very poorly.
So these jobs are simultaneously "amazing opportunities" and "abusive".
I think the difference between what you're complaining about the person saying, and what the person is actually saying could be solved by workers getting paid like $5/hour more (AKA a living wage).
The person didn't say anything that contradicts what they're saying other than that you're unhappy with the status quo that is offered to migrant workers. And you're absolutely right. But a more constructive dialogue would be "let's improve the conditions for those people."
I know that I reply to a post written by someone who refuses to capitalize at my own risk, but
> yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity
You seem to have inadvertently discounted the experiences of people like my dad’s African-born eye doc, who came to this county for the opportunity of medical training which he now uses to make injections into my elderly dad’s eyes every few months.
This just delays coming up to a solution for what to do when population is declining everywhere. It only works as long as those other countries are poor.
No solution is needed. People are empowered to make the fertility choices they're making. Stop issuing debt that will never be paid back for tax cuts today. Stop building infrastructure that no one will be around to maintain. Stop stealing from the future today. The population decline is not the problem; the socioeconomic systems that exploited a global population boom are. They will be forced to change, they have no other option.
Agreed. It will be a looming problem until we can come up with an economic system that doesn't exploit young workers to prop up the older generation. Once we solve that I imagine that we'll see things stabilize population wise.
On a global level, fertility is negatively correlated with national IQ, and on a national level it is negatively correlated with individual IQ. Which strongly contradicts what you wrote.
Yes, that is a statistic that does not in fact exist. It may exist in theory, but there is no mechanism in place anywhere to collect it, and there never has been.
Americans should know this intuitively by dint of most of us never having been "officially" IQ tested. Somehow, the notion of reliable national IQ statistics persists.
Whether anybody in the US is is irrelevant to whether data exists or used to exist from previous decades that was used to get an estimate of the average IQ of the US at that time in the past.
I was tested by the public school system of the second-largest city in Massachusetts and have no reason to believe that my experience was atypical.
About the same time as I was being tested,
in Diana v. State Board of Education (1970) a court ruled that a school could
not place students in a class for mild mental retardation because of a low
score on the Stanford Benet IQ test,
which of course implies that she was tested by her school.
There were other lawsuits like this in other US states.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. There isn't a national survey of IQ in the United States. There also aren't representative data sets from which you could model a national IQ of the United States (unless you think "people volunteering for the military" make up a strongly representative sample of Americans). And the United States is a gigantic industrialized country, exactly the kind of country where cross-sectional research projects like this sometimes do happen --- unlike most of the world, where the only reason people get IQ tests is because doctors suspect them of having cognitive abnormalities.
There is no such thing as "national IQ". That's all I came here to say. I didn't raise my hand and ask to litigate whether anybody on HN had ever taken an "official" IQ test. I'm sure several people have. Most of us: no.
The point of this thread isn't that IQ testing doesn't exist. It's that reliable (or even plausible) comparative national IQ metrics exist. That has to be true for the claim made upthread to make any sense. And: it isn't true.
Bear in mind that the lingering mass and inertia of big things in a process of slowing down can easily make it seem as if they're still doing fine along a certain path, until they're suddenly not.. I doubt we're going to literally drive ourselves to extinction via ceasing to have children at all, but a diminishing birth rate that goes below replacement levels, and an eventual gigantic demographic shift in age averages and total population are going to possibly be worse for us than having more people.
>> The aging populations of rich countries are relying on ever fewer workers to support their economy, dooming those younger generations to a future of higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three.
The fallacy here is that the article does not consider the possibility of rising worker productivity. If productivity rises quickly enough, the ever fewer workers could face a future of lower taxes, lower debt, and earlier retirement.
It's also interesting that the Atlantics of the world have gone from "global fertility is rising and we're all doomed" to "global fertility is falling and we're all doomed". I wonder if in between there was ever an Atlantic article stating that global fertility was optimal and we are not, for the next couple weeks or so, all doomed.
The challenge is that nobody seems to have an answer for “how many people is enough?” Ten billion? 100? We should aim to maintain equilibrium or a slow decrease over centuries so this seems like a necessary, if unpleasant, shift. Unless we go to new planets, I guess.
well that's exactly the point - apparently our population needs to keep growing forever "just because". But if any other animal had no bound on the upper limit of their population the entire globe would be taken over by it.
I like people! I have two kids myself and love them. But it's not like life was horrible when Earth had 5 billion people.
(Note - I am NOT saying that people in poor countries, who tend to use a minute fraction of the resources of rich people, having lots of kids, is necessarily an issue. But if we want to make a higher standard of living possible for everyone in the world it will be easier to do, ecologically speaking, with 9 billion people than with 15 billion)
I'm not aware of a lot of people that want unconstrained growth. But rapid decline has the potential to be a massive problem, and at the moment a rapid decline is what we're headed for.
1. Rapid change of any kind is bad in any ecosystem. Growing the population too fast creates one set of problems, shrinking the population too fast creates a different set of problems.
2. modern humans have the ability to expand consumption to use all available resources. 10 million jet-setting billionaires have a far worse impact on the environment than 1 billion poor people. Adjusting the environmental impact per human is going to have a far greater effect on the environment, and more quickly, than population changes.
And you are right - but poor people _want_ to have material luxuries, by and large, so we should consider what we want our equilibrium state to look like.
Personally, I'm hoping for "8-10 billion people eating low meat diets, living in well insulated homes powered by renewable electricity, in places where they can walk, bike, or take public transport for almost all of their daily needs, and working a 20 hour (or less) week, with the remainder of their time filled with their friends, families, creative passions, and any other joys not yet comprehended"
but it doesn't seem like that's where we're headed.
> Why? (I speak as someone who fits that description and has kids)
I’m not the original commenter, but I assume that the reference is that this/your group fairly reliably across most cultures does not maintain the 2.1 children per woman birth rate / replacement rate needed to sustain a population.
At a minimum, this seems to be true for this particular socioeconomic class in most parts of Europe, East Asia, and US/Canada. Not sure about South Asia.
Well, generally it is "how many people do you need to replace the 2 people that created those people". So the baseline is 2 since you need 2 parents and to replace them you'd need 2 children in an ideal world but since not every child survives long enought to themselves be part of this cycle the .1 comes in.
I've thought about it a bit in the meantime .... In the UK only about 30 children per 100,000 die before age 18 so that would be much less significant than the fact that only about 49% of children are female. Taken together, those facts would imply that you need about 2.0414 children per woman, so 2.05 would be more than enough. So how do we get to 2.1? Perhaps the 2.1 is for other countries with higher infant mortality?
It can be calculated, based on statistics of how many people die before reaching fertility.
But given that the statistics have wide error bars, and there are so many other intervening factors, "a bit more than two" is just as good a way to calculate it.
The question is - how can be free up a higher percentage of people who are able to propel humanity forward from the drudgery of wage slavery in a sustainable manner?
And you need to effectively allocate cognitively proficient people to this as well, not just anyone.
I read every single one of these scare stories as an indictment how ridiculous the "infinite growth" economic model has been.
There's very little to worry about here. Humans are amazingly adaptable, and will find ways to thrive without increasing the population by billions. There are all kinds of benefits to a population that isn't expanding exponentially.
Amazing to me that this article did not breath a word on technological innovations over the same period of projections. Factory automation is not a fantasy. The advent of sophisticated AI systems is not top secret. Strides in robotics and in farming and cow milking and even care of elderly are not secret.
If you are doing projection in just one dimension you can be assured to be wrong.
Mechanical automation took off in the 70s-90s. Today, most people in developed countries work in service jobs, often behind screens. If AI becomes advanced enough, many of these jobs could disappear.
Here's another angle: In poor countries where farming is the main occupation, birth rates tend to be high. But as farming becomes automated, birth rates drop. Following this pattern, AI could push people out of service jobs and potentially impact birth rates in a similar way.
Of course this is just my mind making stuff up. Who know how it'll turn up.
> If AI becomes advanced enough, many of these jobs could disappear
This is a thread about the lack of people to work, not the excess. The jobs that are going to disappear will do so together with the retired/deceased workers.
The problem is that the time benefits of automation are never returned to the people. We'll just invent new bullshit jobs.
(paid) hours worked per family are massively up over time despite exponential progress. We have stuff but no time nor security.
The countries with the most dire birth rates are the ones with a workaholic culture.
The depressing reality is rather than giving people back their time, even more of it will be pushed for in the future, to sustain the ageing population.
IMO there's no replacement TFR fix without mass immigration or some state system to figure out state surrogacy and state orphanage - queue "imperical kinderblock". All the pronatalist policies seem to bring TFR to ~1.6 (but declining), I surmise mix in some punitive policies (i.e. high income / wealth transfer tax for childless) can bring it up slightly higher. But seems like modern life just paradoxically too comfy or stressful to incentivize raising 2.1 TFR kids. Go look at rich middle east countries, every incentive from resources, to religion, to culture to cheap "help" is there, but all those countries gradually going under TFR2. Every 0.1 TFR is about 5% new birth shortfall from stabilizing population, i.e. population will continue to decline. Can kind of TFR "hack" by engineering population sex ratio to be more female, i.e. 60:40 female:male brings replacement TFR to ~1.7, so maybe future is just all female. But all of htis is just a lot of work to... not let the blacks/browns in.
Well, at some population level, the world will not be able to maintain the current technology level. At that point, we will start losing technologies. Once we lose birth control pills (and maybe estrogenoids), I expect the population drop will stabilize - but the world will be at a much lower technology level than it is at today.
I hang out in these pronatal communities, mostly on Twitter. It's a very interesting mix. There's far right wing Nazis and far left wing Communists, atheists and deeply conservative Christians and Muslims. All groping for any clue about how to get people to have more kids. No one knows what recipe of key thing will make people have more.
It reminds me of Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" (Season 6, Episode 20). It's the one where Picard and crew follow a trail of genetic clues left by an ancient humanoid species, eventually discovering that most major humanoid species in the Alpha Quadrant, including Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and Humans, share a common ancestry. Once they figure it out, they all start shooting again and race for the prize.
I imagine the pronatal community will do the same thing if a recipe is discovered.
The other thing is that I do a lot of worldbuilding with mega large societies, like 1 trillion people. It's a weird thing, but fun for me.
In looking at all the data we have on nations and the fun story building aspects, one thing pops out over and over: population. I'd you want to model a city or a province or a state, you need to know the population more than anything else. That'll be the best guide to the number of subway stops, patents per capital, gasoline station placement, average talking and walking speed, etc. it's the key.
And you find that countries/cities/states with higher raw population are generally better places to live. It seems that the more people there are in an arbitrary area, the better things are in gestalt.
So, when we complain that we've got too many people, I think that's wrong. I think we're not taking care of people we'll enough. But in my ramblings through government datasets, it seems that more people is generally just an objectively good thing.
My utopian vision is that people should largely be freed from work. The new job is to create families, raise them, and enjoy them. No coercion is needed for these families to be created, we'll produce them out of boredom. Similar to when there's a sustained power outage.
This won't happen though. Instead we'll combine neural-link and AI and will effectively become bionic beings. You'll be forced to join as to not become an obsolete sub-creature.
So what, the article says it pretty much in the beginning that older generations are actually more like parasites, they should pull themselves up by the bootsraps
It also causes a decline, because later pregnancies will also mean fewer children. Pregnancies after 35 are called "geriatric". (Actually, they now call it "advanced maternal age" to sound less insulting, but the older term conveys how much harder it is to get pregnant and fully gestate.)
A woman who waits until 30 to start a family is likely to not have one. It's a deeply unfortunate dilemma, because her male partner suffers much less decline.
The women's rights movement came with both positive and negative effects that impact birth rates.
Normalizing women as equals in the workforce is great from a rights perspective, but as incomes have started to equalize (and actually start to tip the other direction in younger generations), the pool of prospective mates has shrunk because a large majority of women won't date men that cannot out-earn them. Additionally, there is the problem that a woman taking maternity leave suffers a long-lasting (if not permanent) dip in her earnings from then on. Equivalent paternity leave could help to balance things out, but in the US at least, there are virtually no employers who offer it.
Another hallmark of the women's rights movement which is largely negative has been the demonization of housewives as lessers and treating raising kids as a form of servitude. That in itself discourages having children. However, as stay at home dads are still largely considered unacceptable, having kids now increasingly relies upon extremely expensive day care, significantly increasing their economic burden. If a dual-income household made significantly more than their single-income household counterparts of prior generations (adjusted for inflation), this may be a non-issue, but if anything, dual-income is often required just to get by nowadays.
I think it's more that men's share of duties have not adapted to reflect the empowerment of women, combined with a system that continues to penalize women financially for having kids.
This suggests an optimum of 2 full-time working adults where after a long day at work they perfectly share the workload of chores.
This is morally fine and correct from a fairness principle but it misses the point entirely. Dual income workism is the least likely to produce family sizes large enough to not go extinct. The model may be fair but at the same time its suicidal.
Similarly, seeing a work break to take care of children as an "opportunity cost" suggest that the optimum life path is a 4-5 decades long maximalist devotion to some corporate.
Obviously, each individual and couple is free to pursuit whatever they want, but collectively these models and norms will end us.
Per what little I know of population studies, birthrate and fertility are the same. Fecundity is the potential to have offspring, but is an unmeasurable quantity.
And this is why the US should reform and allow immigration instead of being racist against people from "LA" and Africa.
I have read various articles over the years stating the US economy is/was outdoing the rest of the Tier 1 Countries due to its immigration, even broken as it is. Now we have these racists in charge and they have no idea how much long term economic harm they are doing to the economy.
Again, I am still surprised how Wall Street is letting this happen. Now that they got their Tax Cut for the Rich, maybe the will push back against Trump.
They're racists. I doubt they'd care even if they did know. There is a lot of information about many subjects that they are choosing to ignore, to the detriment of everyone (including themselves, but you can't convince them of that).
Immigrants are able to build homes, thereby helping make property more affordable, if they're not stopped by a bunch of massively hypocritical "liberal" NIMBYs making it illegal to do so.
> Nevermind the fact that it was pulling teeth to get an Irish builder to show up.
Depends on the builder, but like many, many constrained services in Ireland you'll do better if you (or someone you know) have a pre-existing relationship with them.
Maybe it's a place thing also? I do know that we've never had any issues getting plumbers/electricians/roofers/general handypeople to show up, but we're in Dublin.
In Offaly I had to nag the hell out of builders to get them to show up, with reminder calls the day before and day of. The Latvians on the other hand arrived on time and got the job done.
> In Offaly I had to nag the hell out of builders to get them to show up, with reminder calls the day before and day of. The Latvians on the other hand arrived on time and got the job done.
Yeah fair enough that really sucks. I don't disagree that the Latvians were better, but note that there's a selection bias here. The good and responsive Irish builders are probably much more booked up, so you may end up dealing with the flaky ones while the Latvians may have less of an orderbook to work through.
Additionally Ireland (all the non-Dublin parts, at least) lost many, many building professionals after the bust so there may just not be enough people there.
I find it hard to believe that the private equity groups which each own dozens of properties in my region is run by immigrants for less than the median wage. That said, were you to share any data, I'd be more than happy to regard it.
A growing number remain empty, hundreds of thousands of homes are unoccupied in the United States, especially rentals.[1] It turns out multiple billion dollar corporations can afford to keep homes empty in order to raise the price of their assets. Also, just think about what you're saying. Do you really think someone who makes less than you do, without any credit history, is purchasing a home that's out of your price range? If making less money would help you afford a home, I'd be happy to take it off your hands. :)
So someone is in China or India doing incredibly well financially and would like to use this to overpay for a house and work more hours for less money? And this is true for millions of people? And there's data that proves this???
Is this really a crisis? Or is it only a crisis because we've built the global economy around the idea that "number go up" forever? Growth at all costs, even cooking the planet, is central to capitalist mindset that dominates the world.
We're also currently devoting an absurd amount of resources developing technology aimed at replacing as much human labor as possible. All this while Western culture continues to indoctrinate us with the belief that our lives are meaningless without the jobs they are also trying to eliminate.
It kind of is a crisis. You will have lot of elderly people who will be expecting smaller younger generation to take care for them, while younger generation won't be able to do that while also trying to establish themselves, which will repeat for next generation with greater magnitude and so on...
Currently we have here a social system with a positive feedback loop which will eventually rip itself apart.
My grandma is in hospice right now. Her son (my uncle) and myself continually visit and are involved in decisions surrounding her care. My uncle is being willed her estate. My uncle has no children. I have no children. At some point relatively soon there is going to be a lot of assets locked up with a geriatric population with no heirs.
Eventually we will get to fining people who does not have children (Directly or indirectly through taxes), which will make whole thing worse, because they won't be able to afford children even more.
Meanwhile the world population has reached 8.2 billion and is still rising. There are plenty of people out there. Just not the kind of people that those in power want.
This is why immigration is so important to the economy of a developed nation. You bring in families from around the world, give them amazing opportunities, then hire them to take care of the elderly and keep the lights on. Instead, our nation is trying to shut the door like a lone hoarder living in a pile of rotting trash.
>Just not the kind of people that those in power want.
farm owners don't give a fuck what color the cattle is.
>You bring in families from around the world
and if/when they integrate into the host society, their children will have as few children as the natives
>give them amazing opportunities, then hire them to take care of the elderly
yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity
>This is why immigration is so important to the economy of a developed nation.
exploiting the resources of the undeveloped nations is bread and butter of the developed nations, yeah.
cui bono? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2Vh-G3vEk
"yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity"
Nursing and elder care is a field that anyone can respect. Why do you spit on their contribution to society?
I don't spit at the people who do those jobs, I spit at the people who think those jobs are 'amazing opportunities'.
Caregiving is an amazing opportunity. It is life-changing for the person receiving the care. It is fulfilling and soul-affirming for the person delivering the care.
If people agreed with your view that it's an "amazing opportunity" then nursing homes wouldn't be catastrophically understaffed.
Of course that doesn't take away from anyone's enjoyment of that line of work, it is truly important, but it's not something that the vast majority of people see as an "amazing opportunity".
Nursing homes are understaffed because they're for-profit entities looking for $15/hr labor.
This. Caring for people is great. Being in poverty while doing almost anything sucks.
America is great at underpaying and overworking almost everyone for almost everything. America is really only good if you're a decamillionaire or better. In general, it tends (YMMV) better to be in Europe for poorer/average folks who get much more value and protections while paying more taxes.
Um yes, precisely. They're not good opportunities for people to make a living. Did you reply to the wrong person or just stating the obvious?
The person you replied to said
>> Caregiving is an amazing opportunity. It is life-changing for the person receiving the care. It is fulfilling and soul-affirming for the person delivering the care.
That the market doesn't pay well for the work is immaterial to its value.
If you're agreeing to everything they said, and only disagreeing that it pays well: yes.
You're changing the subject, the point of contention was whether it's "an amazing opportunity", not whether the work is valuable.
You’re defining opportunity in strictly monetary terms?
Yes? That's what makes something a broadly recognized "good opportunity" in our current economic system that you can base public policy around. Everything else is just variable personal preference.
People don't leave their home countries and entire lives behind because they're looking for the "opportunity" of nursing a foreigner for a pittance. They do it because they want to make good money and provide for their families.
Around 20% of US elder care facilities will close around 2027 because of the Medicaid cuts that pay for long term care of many to pay for the tax cuts for the rich. It was cynically set to take effect after the midterm elections so people wouldn't realize what was happening.
For the people in countries that still have a high birth rate, they usually are amazing opportunities. Wealthy countries are a lot richer than poor ones, and people will take jobs we scorn.
Unfortunately, we also scorn the people who would want to do them. We set very low immigration limits, and we pay the people who do those jobs (even native ones) very poorly.
So these jobs are simultaneously "amazing opportunities" and "abusive".
if it's so respectable why aren't you doing it?
"kids these days don't want to work!" -- then why aren't you showing them how?
I literally can't afford to do that.
I think the difference between what you're complaining about the person saying, and what the person is actually saying could be solved by workers getting paid like $5/hour more (AKA a living wage).
The person didn't say anything that contradicts what they're saying other than that you're unhappy with the status quo that is offered to migrant workers. And you're absolutely right. But a more constructive dialogue would be "let's improve the conditions for those people."
I know that I reply to a post written by someone who refuses to capitalize at my own risk, but
> yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity
You seem to have inadvertently discounted the experiences of people like my dad’s African-born eye doc, who came to this county for the opportunity of medical training which he now uses to make injections into my elderly dad’s eyes every few months.
(Either that or you’re an idiot).
Actually, I read some of your other posts and I think I figured it out.
funny, I thought those in power tend to get what they want?
We often want things that are bad for us. We eat terrible food, smoke, pollute, litter, and generally act like fools. Those in power are no different.
This just delays coming up to a solution for what to do when population is declining everywhere. It only works as long as those other countries are poor.
No solution is needed. People are empowered to make the fertility choices they're making. Stop issuing debt that will never be paid back for tax cuts today. Stop building infrastructure that no one will be around to maintain. Stop stealing from the future today. The population decline is not the problem; the socioeconomic systems that exploited a global population boom are. They will be forced to change, they have no other option.
Agreed. It will be a looming problem until we can come up with an economic system that doesn't exploit young workers to prop up the older generation. Once we solve that I imagine that we'll see things stabilize population wise.
On a global level, fertility is negatively correlated with national IQ, and on a national level it is negatively correlated with individual IQ. Which strongly contradicts what you wrote.
Cite a source for that? There are, in particular, no such thing as "national IQ" numbers.
"National IQ" refers to the average IQ of a country.
Yes, that is a statistic that does not in fact exist. It may exist in theory, but there is no mechanism in place anywhere to collect it, and there never has been.
Americans should know this intuitively by dint of most of us never having been "officially" IQ tested. Somehow, the notion of reliable national IQ statistics persists.
I was IQ tested by my school in Massachusetts more than once in the 1960s.
Ok? Almost nobody is.
Whether anybody in the US is is irrelevant to whether data exists or used to exist from previous decades that was used to get an estimate of the average IQ of the US at that time in the past.
I was tested by the public school system of the second-largest city in Massachusetts and have no reason to believe that my experience was atypical.
About the same time as I was being tested, in Diana v. State Board of Education (1970) a court ruled that a school could not place students in a class for mild mental retardation because of a low score on the Stanford Benet IQ test, which of course implies that she was tested by her school.
There were other lawsuits like this in other US states.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. There isn't a national survey of IQ in the United States. There also aren't representative data sets from which you could model a national IQ of the United States (unless you think "people volunteering for the military" make up a strongly representative sample of Americans). And the United States is a gigantic industrialized country, exactly the kind of country where cross-sectional research projects like this sometimes do happen --- unlike most of the world, where the only reason people get IQ tests is because doctors suspect them of having cognitive abnormalities.
There is no such thing as "national IQ". That's all I came here to say. I didn't raise my hand and ask to litigate whether anybody on HN had ever taken an "official" IQ test. I'm sure several people have. Most of us: no.
The point of this thread isn't that IQ testing doesn't exist. It's that reliable (or even plausible) comparative national IQ metrics exist. That has to be true for the claim made upthread to make any sense. And: it isn't true.
The downward trend of birth rates applies to both developing and developed countries:
https://www.gapminder.org/answers/how-did-babies-per-woman-c...
Bear in mind that the lingering mass and inertia of big things in a process of slowing down can easily make it seem as if they're still doing fine along a certain path, until they're suddenly not.. I doubt we're going to literally drive ourselves to extinction via ceasing to have children at all, but a diminishing birth rate that goes below replacement levels, and an eventual gigantic demographic shift in age averages and total population are going to possibly be worse for us than having more people.
So sounds you are supporting legal immigration like Musk and Trump?
>> The aging populations of rich countries are relying on ever fewer workers to support their economy, dooming those younger generations to a future of higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three.
The fallacy here is that the article does not consider the possibility of rising worker productivity. If productivity rises quickly enough, the ever fewer workers could face a future of lower taxes, lower debt, and earlier retirement.
It's also interesting that the Atlantics of the world have gone from "global fertility is rising and we're all doomed" to "global fertility is falling and we're all doomed". I wonder if in between there was ever an Atlantic article stating that global fertility was optimal and we are not, for the next couple weeks or so, all doomed.
Probably not. Doomers gotta doom.
The two things are not mutually exclusive.
One looks at the size of the population, which is projected to keep growing for a while. It keeps growing because people live for a long time.
The second looks at the age distribution of the population. What comes after the population peak.
Both are valid problems.
The challenge is that nobody seems to have an answer for “how many people is enough?” Ten billion? 100? We should aim to maintain equilibrium or a slow decrease over centuries so this seems like a necessary, if unpleasant, shift. Unless we go to new planets, I guess.
enough for what?
To spend most of their lives working for others.
well that's exactly the point - apparently our population needs to keep growing forever "just because". But if any other animal had no bound on the upper limit of their population the entire globe would be taken over by it.
I like people! I have two kids myself and love them. But it's not like life was horrible when Earth had 5 billion people.
(Note - I am NOT saying that people in poor countries, who tend to use a minute fraction of the resources of rich people, having lots of kids, is necessarily an issue. But if we want to make a higher standard of living possible for everyone in the world it will be easier to do, ecologically speaking, with 9 billion people than with 15 billion)
I'm not aware of a lot of people that want unconstrained growth. But rapid decline has the potential to be a massive problem, and at the moment a rapid decline is what we're headed for.
How about «enough to have a supply of extremely talented people, able to devise novel solutions to crippling long-term problems we face»?
You won't have many brilliant people in a small natural population.
Without them it's «not with a bang, but with a whimper»
OK, how many is that?
There's no absolute number, it's relative.
1. Rapid change of any kind is bad in any ecosystem. Growing the population too fast creates one set of problems, shrinking the population too fast creates a different set of problems.
2. modern humans have the ability to expand consumption to use all available resources. 10 million jet-setting billionaires have a far worse impact on the environment than 1 billion poor people. Adjusting the environmental impact per human is going to have a far greater effect on the environment, and more quickly, than population changes.
Absolutely (note I referred to gradual change)
And you are right - but poor people _want_ to have material luxuries, by and large, so we should consider what we want our equilibrium state to look like.
Personally, I'm hoping for "8-10 billion people eating low meat diets, living in well insulated homes powered by renewable electricity, in places where they can walk, bike, or take public transport for almost all of their daily needs, and working a 20 hour (or less) week, with the remainder of their time filled with their friends, families, creative passions, and any other joys not yet comprehended"
but it doesn't seem like that's where we're headed.
because people who want "eating low meat diets" and "walk, bike, or take public transport" go extinct first.
Why? (I speak as someone who fits that description and has kids)
> Why? (I speak as someone who fits that description and has kids)
I’m not the original commenter, but I assume that the reference is that this/your group fairly reliably across most cultures does not maintain the 2.1 children per woman birth rate / replacement rate needed to sustain a population.
At a minimum, this seems to be true for this particular socioeconomic class in most parts of Europe, East Asia, and US/Canada. Not sure about South Asia.
Doesn’t make sense. All groups are trending towards sub-replacement fertility. Even the mormons.
Israel has a TFR of 2.9, which has held steady for 40 years.
We do have an answer. It’s 2.1 children per woman. That’s the replacement rate.
We are not on track for equilibrium or a slow decrease over centuries. We are on track for a demographic cliff.
I've seen that "2.1" figure so many times. How is it calculated? (Or is it just a concise and informal way of saying "a bit more than two"?)
Well, generally it is "how many people do you need to replace the 2 people that created those people". So the baseline is 2 since you need 2 parents and to replace them you'd need 2 children in an ideal world but since not every child survives long enought to themselves be part of this cycle the .1 comes in.
I've thought about it a bit in the meantime .... In the UK only about 30 children per 100,000 die before age 18 so that would be much less significant than the fact that only about 49% of children are female. Taken together, those facts would imply that you need about 2.0414 children per woman, so 2.05 would be more than enough. So how do we get to 2.1? Perhaps the 2.1 is for other countries with higher infant mortality?
You get 2.1 because they only want to show 2 significant digits, but it's important to show that the number is greater than 2.0.
From individual families' perspectives, you can only have a whole number of kids anyway, so 2.1 vs. 2.04 isn't a meaningful difference.
Being dead isn't the only reason someone can't have kids.
It can be calculated, based on statistics of how many people die before reaching fertility.
But given that the statistics have wide error bars, and there are so many other intervening factors, "a bit more than two" is just as good a way to calculate it.
That's not even the right question.
The question is - how can be free up a higher percentage of people who are able to propel humanity forward from the drudgery of wage slavery in a sustainable manner?
And you need to effectively allocate cognitively proficient people to this as well, not just anyone.
I read every single one of these scare stories as an indictment how ridiculous the "infinite growth" economic model has been.
There's very little to worry about here. Humans are amazingly adaptable, and will find ways to thrive without increasing the population by billions. There are all kinds of benefits to a population that isn't expanding exponentially.
Amazing to me that this article did not breath a word on technological innovations over the same period of projections. Factory automation is not a fantasy. The advent of sophisticated AI systems is not top secret. Strides in robotics and in farming and cow milking and even care of elderly are not secret.
If you are doing projection in just one dimension you can be assured to be wrong.
Does that alone solve the problems listed though — taxation, etc.?
Mechanical automation took off in the 70s-90s. Today, most people in developed countries work in service jobs, often behind screens. If AI becomes advanced enough, many of these jobs could disappear.
Here's another angle: In poor countries where farming is the main occupation, birth rates tend to be high. But as farming becomes automated, birth rates drop. Following this pattern, AI could push people out of service jobs and potentially impact birth rates in a similar way.
Of course this is just my mind making stuff up. Who know how it'll turn up.
> If AI becomes advanced enough, many of these jobs could disappear
This is a thread about the lack of people to work, not the excess. The jobs that are going to disappear will do so together with the retired/deceased workers.
The problem is that the time benefits of automation are never returned to the people. We'll just invent new bullshit jobs.
(paid) hours worked per family are massively up over time despite exponential progress. We have stuff but no time nor security.
The countries with the most dire birth rates are the ones with a workaholic culture.
The depressing reality is rather than giving people back their time, even more of it will be pushed for in the future, to sustain the ageing population.
https://archive.today/Cbk2j
Previous:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44423897 - June 2025 (22 comments)
For how this is going to play out, look at Japan where it's already started.
For my part, I'm not convinced the issues will be insurmountable and terrible.
IMO there's no replacement TFR fix without mass immigration or some state system to figure out state surrogacy and state orphanage - queue "imperical kinderblock". All the pronatalist policies seem to bring TFR to ~1.6 (but declining), I surmise mix in some punitive policies (i.e. high income / wealth transfer tax for childless) can bring it up slightly higher. But seems like modern life just paradoxically too comfy or stressful to incentivize raising 2.1 TFR kids. Go look at rich middle east countries, every incentive from resources, to religion, to culture to cheap "help" is there, but all those countries gradually going under TFR2. Every 0.1 TFR is about 5% new birth shortfall from stabilizing population, i.e. population will continue to decline. Can kind of TFR "hack" by engineering population sex ratio to be more female, i.e. 60:40 female:male brings replacement TFR to ~1.7, so maybe future is just all female. But all of htis is just a lot of work to... not let the blacks/browns in.
Maybe someone knows — assuming birth rates stabilize, albeit lower, do things also stabilize in society a generation after that?
In other words, is it perhaps ("only") a two-generation pain-span the world is going to have to endure?
Emdash. I see it everywhere now that I know to look for it.
Well, at some population level, the world will not be able to maintain the current technology level. At that point, we will start losing technologies. Once we lose birth control pills (and maybe estrogenoids), I expect the population drop will stabilize - but the world will be at a much lower technology level than it is at today.
> Maybe someone knows — assuming birth rates stabilize, albeit lower, do things also stabilize in society a generation after that?
No! Read the article. Birth rates can go extremely low (<0.5), and a society with fertility <2 goes gets exponentially smaller with each generation.
A few comments here.
I hang out in these pronatal communities, mostly on Twitter. It's a very interesting mix. There's far right wing Nazis and far left wing Communists, atheists and deeply conservative Christians and Muslims. All groping for any clue about how to get people to have more kids. No one knows what recipe of key thing will make people have more.
It reminds me of Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" (Season 6, Episode 20). It's the one where Picard and crew follow a trail of genetic clues left by an ancient humanoid species, eventually discovering that most major humanoid species in the Alpha Quadrant, including Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and Humans, share a common ancestry. Once they figure it out, they all start shooting again and race for the prize.
I imagine the pronatal community will do the same thing if a recipe is discovered.
The other thing is that I do a lot of worldbuilding with mega large societies, like 1 trillion people. It's a weird thing, but fun for me.
In looking at all the data we have on nations and the fun story building aspects, one thing pops out over and over: population. I'd you want to model a city or a province or a state, you need to know the population more than anything else. That'll be the best guide to the number of subway stops, patents per capital, gasoline station placement, average talking and walking speed, etc. it's the key.
And you find that countries/cities/states with higher raw population are generally better places to live. It seems that the more people there are in an arbitrary area, the better things are in gestalt.
So, when we complain that we've got too many people, I think that's wrong. I think we're not taking care of people we'll enough. But in my ramblings through government datasets, it seems that more people is generally just an objectively good thing.
My utopian vision is that people should largely be freed from work. The new job is to create families, raise them, and enjoy them. No coercion is needed for these families to be created, we'll produce them out of boredom. Similar to when there's a sustained power outage.
This won't happen though. Instead we'll combine neural-link and AI and will effectively become bionic beings. You'll be forced to join as to not become an obsolete sub-creature.
Not everyone wants or needs kids to not be bored. Life for life’s sake, to enjoy and experience as they please.
So what, the article says it pretty much in the beginning that older generations are actually more like parasites, they should pull themselves up by the bootsraps
Could it be a hole that was created by improvements in women's rights?
My sister got three kids, but she got them after 30.
My mom and my grandma got their first child with 20.
Or just birth control.
Your anecdote suggests pushing out the population but not causing it to decline.
Fair.
I just thought, maybe the decline is just temporary.
It also causes a decline, because later pregnancies will also mean fewer children. Pregnancies after 35 are called "geriatric". (Actually, they now call it "advanced maternal age" to sound less insulting, but the older term conveys how much harder it is to get pregnant and fully gestate.)
A woman who waits until 30 to start a family is likely to not have one. It's a deeply unfortunate dilemma, because her male partner suffers much less decline.
The women's rights movement came with both positive and negative effects that impact birth rates.
Normalizing women as equals in the workforce is great from a rights perspective, but as incomes have started to equalize (and actually start to tip the other direction in younger generations), the pool of prospective mates has shrunk because a large majority of women won't date men that cannot out-earn them. Additionally, there is the problem that a woman taking maternity leave suffers a long-lasting (if not permanent) dip in her earnings from then on. Equivalent paternity leave could help to balance things out, but in the US at least, there are virtually no employers who offer it.
Another hallmark of the women's rights movement which is largely negative has been the demonization of housewives as lessers and treating raising kids as a form of servitude. That in itself discourages having children. However, as stay at home dads are still largely considered unacceptable, having kids now increasingly relies upon extremely expensive day care, significantly increasing their economic burden. If a dual-income household made significantly more than their single-income household counterparts of prior generations (adjusted for inflation), this may be a non-issue, but if anything, dual-income is often required just to get by nowadays.
I think it's more that men's share of duties have not adapted to reflect the empowerment of women, combined with a system that continues to penalize women financially for having kids.
This suggests an optimum of 2 full-time working adults where after a long day at work they perfectly share the workload of chores.
This is morally fine and correct from a fairness principle but it misses the point entirely. Dual income workism is the least likely to produce family sizes large enough to not go extinct. The model may be fair but at the same time its suicidal.
Similarly, seeing a work break to take care of children as an "opportunity cost" suggest that the optimum life path is a 4-5 decades long maximalist devotion to some corporate.
Obviously, each individual and couple is free to pursuit whatever they want, but collectively these models and norms will end us.
Can't grow forever, there was going to be an inflection point at some time, story over.
Why was this flagged?
Does anyone know why and when fertility replaced birth rate? It always grinds my gears as fertility is potential but birth rate is measured output.
Per what little I know of population studies, birthrate and fertility are the same. Fecundity is the potential to have offspring, but is an unmeasurable quantity.
And this is why the US should reform and allow immigration instead of being racist against people from "LA" and Africa.
I have read various articles over the years stating the US economy is/was outdoing the rest of the Tier 1 Countries due to its immigration, even broken as it is. Now we have these racists in charge and they have no idea how much long term economic harm they are doing to the economy.
Again, I am still surprised how Wall Street is letting this happen. Now that they got their Tax Cut for the Rich, maybe the will push back against Trump.
They're racists. I doubt they'd care even if they did know. There is a lot of information about many subjects that they are choosing to ignore, to the detriment of everyone (including themselves, but you can't convince them of that).
great idea. drive the property prices up, drive the wages down. that will totally help* the TFR :^)
* please disregard the data that shows that it doesn't help at all.
Immigrants are able to build homes, thereby helping make property more affordable, if they're not stopped by a bunch of massively hypocritical "liberal" NIMBYs making it illegal to do so.
European peoples are capable of building their own houses and cooking their own food.
Apparently not considering the current housing shortage.
Nevermind the fact that it was pulling teeth to get an Irish builder to show up.
> Nevermind the fact that it was pulling teeth to get an Irish builder to show up.
Depends on the builder, but like many, many constrained services in Ireland you'll do better if you (or someone you know) have a pre-existing relationship with them.
Maybe it's a place thing also? I do know that we've never had any issues getting plumbers/electricians/roofers/general handypeople to show up, but we're in Dublin.
In Offaly I had to nag the hell out of builders to get them to show up, with reminder calls the day before and day of. The Latvians on the other hand arrived on time and got the job done.
> In Offaly I had to nag the hell out of builders to get them to show up, with reminder calls the day before and day of. The Latvians on the other hand arrived on time and got the job done.
Yeah fair enough that really sucks. I don't disagree that the Latvians were better, but note that there's a selection bias here. The good and responsive Irish builders are probably much more booked up, so you may end up dealing with the flaky ones while the Latvians may have less of an orderbook to work through.
Additionally Ireland (all the non-Dublin parts, at least) lost many, many building professionals after the bust so there may just not be enough people there.
I find it hard to believe that the private equity groups which each own dozens of properties in my region is run by immigrants for less than the median wage. That said, were you to share any data, I'd be more than happy to regard it.
who do they sell/rent those properties to?
A growing number remain empty, hundreds of thousands of homes are unoccupied in the United States, especially rentals.[1] It turns out multiple billion dollar corporations can afford to keep homes empty in order to raise the price of their assets. Also, just think about what you're saying. Do you really think someone who makes less than you do, without any credit history, is purchasing a home that's out of your price range? If making less money would help you afford a home, I'd be happy to take it off your hands. :)
[1]: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDP5Y2023.DP04?t=Housing+Uni...
>It turns out multiple billion dollar corporations can afford to keep homes empty in order to raise the price of their assets.
would they be doing that if they didn't have a guarantee that importation of millions of people will continue?
>Do you really think someone who makes less than you do, without any credit history, is purchasing a home that's out of your price range?
there are millions of Chinese and Indians who can buy those homes with cash.
So someone is in China or India doing incredibly well financially and would like to use this to overpay for a house and work more hours for less money? And this is true for millions of people? And there's data that proves this???
Is this really a crisis? Or is it only a crisis because we've built the global economy around the idea that "number go up" forever? Growth at all costs, even cooking the planet, is central to capitalist mindset that dominates the world.
We're also currently devoting an absurd amount of resources developing technology aimed at replacing as much human labor as possible. All this while Western culture continues to indoctrinate us with the belief that our lives are meaningless without the jobs they are also trying to eliminate.
It kind of is a crisis. You will have lot of elderly people who will be expecting smaller younger generation to take care for them, while younger generation won't be able to do that while also trying to establish themselves, which will repeat for next generation with greater magnitude and so on...
Currently we have here a social system with a positive feedback loop which will eventually rip itself apart.
My grandma is in hospice right now. Her son (my uncle) and myself continually visit and are involved in decisions surrounding her care. My uncle is being willed her estate. My uncle has no children. I have no children. At some point relatively soon there is going to be a lot of assets locked up with a geriatric population with no heirs.
Balancing the population pyramid does not require number go up. It requires replacement level birth rates.
When that birth is far below replacement, you get a collapse that cannot be stopped once it gets going.
based on my current projections, horse and buggy demand will outpace new computer demand by 2050
having children isn't economically rational
the economy will collapse if everyone stops having children
really makes you think
Collective action problem.
Eventually we will get to fining people who does not have children (Directly or indirectly through taxes), which will make whole thing worse, because they won't be able to afford children even more.