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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
>> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Readit News
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.
https://www.gapminder.org/answers/how-did-babies-per-woman-c...
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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
Nursing and elder care is a field that anyone can respect. Why do you spit on their contribution to society?
> 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).
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."
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.
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 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.
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.
We are not on track for equilibrium or a slow decrease over centuries. We are on track for a demographic cliff.
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)
You won't have many brilliant people in a small natural population.
Without them it's «not with a bang, but with a whimper»
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.
If you are doing projection in just one dimension you can be assured to be wrong.
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.
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.
(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.
Previous:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44423897 - June 2025 (22 comments)
For my part, I'm not convinced the issues will be insurmountable and terrible.