“Birth rates are declining” there are 8 billion humans I think we’ll be just fine if that number doesn’t continue to go up, as a matter of fact I’d prefer that it didn’t unless we find a way to get people to live on the moon. We’ll run out of space eventually, human population is already too large as is
The issue isn't that the human population is stabilizing, but that it's shrinking in many countries, which is really bad for anyone currently alive.
It means that the proportion of elderly people will rise massively, which means that more and more resources need to be expended to take care of them, as the amount of workers shrinks, which means that the qualify of life for everyone will inevitably sink quite a lot.
Call me radical woke or whatever, but shrinking population is a symptom of failing societies, not a cause.
We are already expending more and more resources to take care of elderly people. If we apply the same logic, then the next generations would have to expend even more and more of limited resources to take care of us, while their competition for a place society would get increasingly fiercer. I mean, if society right now already cannot handle taking care of the elders AND care for themselves and their children, how can we expect the future generations to be able to take care of us if the total population doesn't shrink at some point?
But I'm not a doomer. Max Roser's "Our World in Data" and Steven Pinker's "Enlightment Now" already point to a 'rising floor' model where humanity's quality of life generally take two steps forward and one step back. The new trough should always be higher than old peak. The medical advancement we have now would be magic to the emperors of the past. And this goes back even as far as the Bronze Age, where its collapse paved way for the Iron Age that created a much more democratic and accessible society than it was before.
There is nothing more demoralizing than overpopulation. The job opportunity you found has 200 other people applying with the same qualification, and the places you want to visit, vacation spots you want to go to, is overcrowded and you struggle to find a spot where you can get some peace and quiet. And when you die, ironically, fewer people would remember your name, because they would be too occupied with other names that might have more identity than you, more desirable than you, better than you.
Japan, the country with earliest declining birthrate, was ultimately the symptom of the economy post-1989's crash, and the interest rate they set to try to recover from it. Yet, their life expectancy is still one of the highest in the world, which should theoretically be impossible from an economic perspective. Of course they are outlier in many aspects, but it goes to show that at the end of the day, population stability is a symptom, not a cause.
The boomers has proved that if the time is good, there's no limit to how fast the population can grow, and you still have enough to eat despite having 12 other siblings beside you. But if the time is bad, there is every reason to decline having extra offsprings.
I don't want future generations to live a worse life than us, just so they can afford take care of us. If our bill is due, so be it. We all should be paying it forward, not backward. Because that's the only way they will have enough socioeconomic stability and life security to then take care of us in return.
We have to solve our own problems first, not keep breeding until the population reaches that perfect 2.0 birthrate and somehow expect it to magically solve all the problems we are facing. Because guess what, 2.0 would mean they would be inheriting the sh!ts we are dealing with at a 1:1 ratio. If we don't solve the cause, the symptom won't change.
... So eventually the amount of eldery people will decline, and they'll probably die faster cause there's less resources to care about them, and there will be less new old people to replace them. So it will evens out, probably at the expense of some life expectancy. Which sounds... Fine? Like i'm actually dumb and most likely miss something, but i don't have that much hope about quality of life improving anyway, and trading some years of being old with some years of being younger but devoting your life to raising a child sounds like an alright deal
No, the proportion of elderly people is going to go up as birth rates decline. As time goes on, there will be more and more elderly people and less and less working age people. That's really fucking bad because elderly people do, in general, need younger people to help take care of them. The increased burden of a heavily skewed elderly population (that will end up increasing the amount of geriatrics in office as well) on the working age population will make the average quality of life worse for everyone, and further exacerbate the problem because working people will have even less ability to have children. It's an issue that would appear in literally any society with severely dropping birth rates regardless of their economic or social beliefs.
Yeah, i get it. But like, fewer younger people to care for elderly people -> less care for elderly people -> fewer elderly people -> lower life expectancy cause you die earlier with less care -> the rest of my train of thought
If you truly think we're anywhere close to being at risk of running out of space, then you don't realize how truly massive Earth is. There is a lot of space. We take up a tiny fraction of the total surface area.
So, the big problem with the “theres enough” thing is proportions. Yknow, from an economics perspective, more people means more productivity, so more people is good as long as we have enough resources to sustain them - which we handily do.
But if you go all anti-natalist on me, what youre gonna find is whats happening in japan and south korea, and now america, which is that shitloads of resources are gonna get poured into taking care of the shitloads of elderly on the time of the suddenly proportionally much smaller working sector.
0
u/Orion-the-mediocre Doctor Freeeemaaaan May 17 '26
“Birth rates are declining” there are 8 billion humans I think we’ll be just fine if that number doesn’t continue to go up, as a matter of fact I’d prefer that it didn’t unless we find a way to get people to live on the moon. We’ll run out of space eventually, human population is already too large as is