Thoughts from Robin Hanson on the fertility reckoning.
Elon worries about this. But I suspect that it will mean that religions that promote fertility, like LDS, will take over.
20 thoughts on “The Coming Population Decline”
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Thoughts from Robin Hanson on the fertility reckoning.
Elon worries about this. But I suspect that it will mean that religions that promote fertility, like LDS, will take over.
Comments are closed.
The underlying issue is indeed a reality.
But the assertions and claims of the article are often baseless and the proposed solution poorly thought-out.
Yes. One does not get the impression Robin Hanson has done much research on this matter. Russia tried the “fat government check” thing decades ago. Copious babies resulted. And as soon as the fat government checks cleared, their mothers delivered said babies to orphanages which broke under the strain and produced a population of psychological cripples who are still a drag on Russian society.
The Tibet population in China is growing a lot.
It’s a small population. But China’s population is going crash a lot.
Yes. When the PRC cracks up, Tibet will almost certainly become a protectorate of India.
“The key issue in such a reckoning is this: which of our usual cherished values that hinder fertility shall we consider compromising or at least substantially moderating in order to ensure the continuation of something like our dominant world culture? It seems to me that an attractive robust approach is to have governments pay lots for kids (at no cost or risk to them!) and then let those who respond to these incentives tell us which compromises seem most attractive. But alas we seem to need pretty big value changes, and thus a pretty big reckoning, for voters to even be willing to consider such large payments.
So, let the reckoning begin. ”
It wouldn’t work anyhow, and the reckoning has already begun.
I think ocean settlements could be a solution.
Also space settlements.
But space settlements will start ocean settlements.
Just Mars crewed Mars exploration, will start ocean settlements.
It’s too late. Now the Gods of the Copybook Headings with fire and slaughter return. Duck and cover.
Space settlements are a good long-term probability. Two centuries hence, the majority of humanity could well be living in rotating habitats.
But ocean settlements won’t be a thing so long as still-extant populations can take up residence in territories where “native” populations have vanished or nearly done so. If there are no ocean settlements as Earth’s population approaches 9 billion – and there aren’t – there will still be none as said population falls back to 8 billion and then 7.
Marxism is like any other religion, and “comes the Revolution” women will be serving on their backs, as always. Members of the Nomenklatura are made. not born. I think Marxism is just the latest Abrahamic religion, bent on destroying the rational West, as Islam destroyed Persia, as Christianity felled the Greco-Roman world. Something God-awful happened in the Levantine Iron Dark Age after the Bronze Age Collapse, whose first fruit was the Tophet Cult. Rome tried to stop it by ploughing under Carthage, but didn’t know the hits would keep on coming.
James Lindsay traces Marxism back to the Gnostics.
Well, they both have know-it-all-ism in common.
The first requirement to winning the future is to show up. If First World countries are not having enough children to maintain their populations while many Third World countries are, then we know who will ultimately win the future.
It won’t be that simple.
The post-WW2 Bretton Woods order the U.S. stood up in the mid-1940s is now in recessional. It was this order that allowed sufficient access to Western technology for formerly poor and thinly-populated nations to become poor and heavily-populated nations with a few even becoming non-poor as well as heavily-populated – usually due to fortunately situated resource lodes. As said resources run out, so will money. These places will quickly revert to their former state-of-nature populations. This will be a particularly ugly process in Sub-Saharan Africa, what is now the PRC and The Middle East.
First-world nations, particularly our own, will be able pick and choose among the refugees from such places and the ambitious from many others to maintain or grow our own population for some time yet. Long enough, certainly, to accomplish whatever social transformations are needed to establish a new long-term-stable norm.
The problem is that social and cultural values are not genetically transmitted, and the children born to the non-Lefty cultures are vulnerable to being ‘hijacked’ by the lefty cultures if their parents are not extremely careful. Look what happens to kids when they head off to college, for instance. Unless very firm measures are taken to guard against this, the notion of differential birthrates being a hope for the future is a dangerously slender reed to rely upon.
Raising kids is expensive and a lot of work. Leftists control the mass media, most of government, and education from pre-K through post-doc. They don’t have to bother raising kids of their own. All they have to do is indoctrinate enough of our kids to grow their numbers.
That begs the question of the purpose of having kids.
“All they have to do is indoctrinate enough of our kids to grow their numbers”
The fraction of the kids they successfully indoctrinate will join them as low breeders they will be out reproduced by the ones they failed to indoctrinate. In the end natural selection will win out it always has it always will; and we haven’t even gotten to the issue of say immigration. Tens of millions of people migrating from the third world to Europe/USA most of whom are still operating on the traditional religious/cultural norm of reproduction. Non-breeders will be displaced by breeders; no amount of propaganda/indoctrination/brain washing can stop that. Eventually the breeders will be in charge; if you declare war on nature, nature will win you will lose badly.
“Look what happens to kids when they head off to college, for instance.”
But the way college costs are increasing a larger and larger percentages of young folks (and older ones) might opt out of traditional colleges in favor on-line schooling perhaps. Maybe an on-line school makes it harder to brain wash them; you don’t have that 24/7 cultural indoctrination of someone living on campus in dorms etc. In any case I wouldn’t bet against natural selection winning out in the end; future cultures will be largely determined by those who have the kids over those who don’t for whatever reason. The non breeders will simply be crowded out by the “breeders”; those who reproduce along with whatever social/cultural/religious/philosophical mix causes them to enthusiastically reproduce.
College has been about licensing, rather than education, for a long time.
The cost of not having kids approaches zero on the short term. It used to be at least celibacy. At the same time, the cost of rearing kids increases exponentially while the time frame stretches beyond two decades in developed countries.
In less developed countries, dramatically lowered infant mortality as well as many women deciding that they would rather not spend 20 years of their life either pregnant or nursing is making a difference as well. The crucial difference is between three or four in the developing world and far less than two in the rest.
China’s repudiation of the one child policy isn’t making a difference. The cost is too high for almost anyone to consider more than one child. They seem to be entering one of their dark periods which will start to attack their demographics from both ends of the age spectrum.
Children are seen as a luxury good, competing with Lamborghinis and world cruises.
The PRC’s demographics are already irretrievably terminal. Recent fertility numbers for major PRC cities make even the One Child Policy era look like the good old days.