The scale of the future problem
The BBC asks
How should countries deal with falling birth rates?
However, the scale of the future problem is immense. For a country in the developed world to increase or maintain its population it needs a birth rate of 2.1 children per woman on average. This is known as the “replacement rate”.
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But why the concern about falling birth rates? The economic problems they can cause are significant, as countries face the impact of both aging and declining populations, and a smaller workforce in relation to the number of pensioners.
For example – where will a nation’s economic growth come from if companies cannot recruit enough workers? And how can a smaller workforce afford to pay for the pensions of a much larger retired population? Those are questions that make government economists wince.
Yes but what about that other thing? You know the one. What about all the wildfires and droughts and floods and massive hurricanes and killer heatwaves? What about the crop failures and famines? What about the inevitable resource wars?
Does it really make sense to resist population decline when we know that the future populations are going to be dealing with all that only much worse?
The obvious answer never occurs to them. I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people, and it’s hard to get them to understand. If we destroy the earth, the economy won’t matter, will it?
Since the economy is man-made and the environment is evolved (and orders of magnitude more complicated than the most complicated economic system or corporate hierarchy), it makes sense to make changes to the economy that do not rely on constant growth, and can handle population declines.
I talk to people who think it doesn’t matter if we have forests and deer and birds and insects anymore. What the flying fuck do they think we rely on to survive? Even couching it in strictly human terms, forgetting all the arguments about aesthetics and morality and so forth, it is simply ignorant and foolhardy to contemplate the world without an environment. A world with a destroyed environment would be a world we couldn’t live in.
It’s the same thing for the goofs that think we need to get all the chemicals out of the environment. The environment IS chemicals. We are chemicals. Our food is chemicals. Our water is chemicals. Go learn a little bit of science, then maybe come back and lecture me (with a Ph.D. in environmental biology) on how things work. If you really educate yourself, you’ll learn enough not to lecture me.
The environment is so much a tangled, interwoven system that we can’t change one thing without changing something else, something we may not be aware of. We can fix one thing while breaking another, especially using the blunt tools we usually use. Fix emissions! But don’t worry about endangered species; we can continue destroying habitats, we just need to do it in cars that burn clean.
And then there is the other trope, which I despise. “Don’t point out problems if you don’t have the solution!” WTF? Sorry, nope. If someone sees a problem, they should point it out. Someone else may have the solution. Maybe no one has the solution, but if we work together we will find it. Maybe I do have the solution but no one will listen because it isn’t what they want to hear.
Sorry, rant over.
A sudden drop-off in population could cause a lot of disruption, but gradual decline that we can see coming decades away really should be manageable and as you note, has some benefits.
There’s also just the fundamental fact that by and large, this is what people want. As societies become richer and more educated, as child mortality declines, and most especially as women become freer and have better access to birth control, people choose to have fewer children on average. I’m rather turned off by talk of massive social engineering projects designed on the premise that sure, you want fewer babies but what about our GDP?
This is about the point in the conversation where liberals start to say that well, people would totally have more kids if they could afford them, so we should have more generous parental leave policies and subsidized/free child care and a better social safety net, etc. etc. But that runs up against the reality that the countries you can point to as models in those respects also have low birth rates! (Not saying that those policies might not be good in and of themselves, but they’re unlikely to substantially increase birth rates.)
A little thought experiment I like is: what do you think is the ideal population of Earth 100 years from now? Would it be better if there were twice as many people as now? Ten times as many? A hundred times? Or the same, or half, etc.? I don’t really have a number in mind, I want it to be the result of free choices, which I strongly suspect would mean fewer people than we have today.
All those people wringing their hands over this don’t want to have to admit that the logical solution is to allow young immigrants from countries with more people than they can support period. But we must prevent the influx of the “wrong” people by encouraging more of the “right people” to breed. The demographic upheavals of declining and aging populations are going to be a rough phase for societies to go through, but we managed to get through the upside of the hump of increasing populations. Unfortunately the cost of that was our current crises of climate instability and loss of biodiversity, both of which were exacerbated by the existence of more humans. We’re in uncharted cultural territory; the recent explosion of human numbers and power have given us no tools or trasditions at hand to fall back on. We’ve blown past the millenia-old cultural wisdom instilled by generations of humans living in smaller numbers, closer to the local conditions which dictated and limited the numbers of humans that could be supported sustainably over long periods of time. Local overuse resulted in local displacement, competition, or extinction of both human and other-than-human populations. Our “local” is now planetary, and the displacement, competition and extinctns our activities produce are global. Maybe this was inevitable. Maybe not. It’s always been easier to discount the needs of a future yet to come in exchange for the boon that’s in front of us at the present moment. Whether or not it was something we could have avoided or prevented, here we are, like it or not.
The unprecedented explosion of human numbers was powered, quite literally, by the equally unprecedented, massive, one-time injection of fossil fuels, which offered a huge boost in quality and ease of life that would have otherwise been impossible. But much, if not most, of that expansion and boost was completely unplanned and unregulated. Upon learning (again) that there is (still) no free lunch, such wild abandon, free-for-all, unfetttered, every-corporation-for-itself anarchy, will not serve us to escape the long term consequences of our short term “success.” Getting out of the multi-dimensional corner we’ve painted ourselves into is going to take a lot more care, skill, and planning than was on display when we blindly got ourselves into it. We’ve seen how the short term greed of energy companies prevented timely implementation of measures to counter the CO2 crisis that their own researches predicted and warned about decades ago. We can’t afford to let the same kind of vested interests dictate the degree and shape of the solutions we will need to get out of the crisis they helped magnify.
Having fewer humans in total reduces our footprint and pressure on the biogeophysical resources and services that all species rely upon. Certainly the issues of fewer younger people supporting more older people are real, but figuring out a way through this rough patch without birthing more humans, and allowing the movement of those who are already here, is the better solution. Over the long run, things will work themselves out. It might not be easy or simple, but “easy” and “simple” (as well as profitable for some) is what helped create much of this problem in the first place. Surely we’re clever enough to come up with something safer that is workable?
The apparent rise of right wing populism worldwide is going to make it more difficult to avoid the efforts of xenophobic nationalists of all stripes to bolster numbers of the “right people” within their borders. The erosion of women’s reproductive rights will undoubtedly increase under this international natalist campaign.
But water comes out of the tap, electricity comes out of the wall, and food comes from the grocery store. What’s earth got to do with it?
Teaching the fundamental reliance on human civilization on the biosphere and its attendant geophysical processes and cycles should be at least as important as lessons in civics, but the supposed privilege of not having to know even the bare outlines of how everything we rely on works and connects is coming back to bite us. Our decisions are not going to be as well informed as they should have been, which means they’re less likely to be good.
But that would mean interfering with the naturally beneficial results of the free market. You’re some kind of communist, aren’t you?
I remember years ago, early in the course of my ongoing reading about environmental issues, coming across the idea in one of the books I’d found that “You can never do just one thing.” Also, the concept that “There is no such thing as a ‘side-effect,’ ” meaning that the undesired consequences of a process, product, or drug are as much a part of that item as its desired properties, and that sweeping them under the rug as if they did not exist does not prevent their arising and the need to account for them. (It might have been The Whale and the Reactor, or Filters against Folly.)
This is what scares me most about prospect of geo-engineering. The longer we go without implementing fundamental, widespread changes to how we do things over the long haul, and the more obvious that things are going to hell, the greater the pressure will be to launch some massive, drastic, quick-fix “solution” which might have equivalently massive, drastic, unforeseen, unintended consequences*. Increase those risks by an order of magnitude if somebody or somebodies stand to get rich(er) by offering such an ill-thought-out, quick fix scheme. (Speaking of blunt tools…for some reason Elon Musk comes to mind. This is exactly the sort of combination of egotistical, megalomaniacal, and saviour-complex move I could see him offering, or worse, launching on his own, once he realizes that his “Let’s go to Mars” escape plan will never work. I could see him launching some kind of orbital particulate screen to block sunlight in an effort to cool surface temperatures. He’s going to use those rockets for something, and he sure as hell isn’t going to ask anyone for permission.)
I’ve put a library request in for columnist Gwynne Dyer’s latest book, Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers to get a sense of some the coming attractions on their way to a planet near us. https://gwynnedyer.com/books/
This is one of the problems of putting so much attention and emphasis on anthropogenic global warming (and CO2 specifically): that narrowly addressing or even solving that alone still does nothing to stop loss of biodiversity, or resource depletion, and all manner of other human pressures on the planet resulting from our numbers, any one of which could end civilization. Thinking you’ve finished the job by dismounting only one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse leaves the other three to ride roughshod, unopposed, over the hollow victory you’ve declared.
Yes; by that logic, it would have been wrong to point out that the Titanic was sinking unless you were ready to plug the hole yourself.
*Think of the introduction of starlings to North America, or rabbits to Australia, but with more immediate, dire, negative feedbacks that accidentally kill millions of people because of unanticipated disruptions in agricultural production. Ooops. But hey, as long as we can keep running our AC and driving our SUVs.
…And if we don’t figure out how to handle the latter, the former will inevitably be thrust upon us. Little comfort, that :-/
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Honestly YNnB do you have to write two such good comments back to back while I’m out gallivanting around the city? Write a dud once in a while, just to make sure you know how.
The news keeps vacillating between “we need more people to keep the economy up” and “we don’t have enough jobs for all these people to do.” So which is it? Too many people and not enough work for them to do, or too much work to be done and not enough people to do it?
It seems to me that the problem is in the words “economic growth”. Economic growth is not an end in itself, and economic growth isn’t even synonymous with human economic output anymore. Economic growth has been a rough proxy for quality of life for the past century, because up until now all meaningful work was done by humans. Economic growth = value derived from labour = value derived ultimately from human labour, has been the fundamental system for so long, I think a lot of people are struggling to even comprehend what the world will look like when the fundamental variable — that economic output comes from human work of some kind — is disrupted in a way that we need far, far fewer people to produce the same amount of “economic output”.
I find it funny that Elon Musk is equally fond of saying that soon there won’t be enough humans to do all the jobs AND that there soon won’t be enough jobs for all the humans to do. He is a vocal proponent of both of those views. It doesn’t make sense. (Well, it makes sense that he is an egomaniac who wants to keep fucking and making more babies. He’s got at least eleven at last count from I don’t even know how many different women, including former and current colleagues. So his vocal pleas about the world needing more children may just be something like an elaborate pick-up line: c’mon baby, we’re saving the world.)
Every previous cycle of innovation has involved making a bunch of human jobs redundant and simultaneously creating a bunch of new jobs for them to do. Generally, as the economy grew more complex, we shifted from physical work to brain work. The industrial age set off the process of handing most physical work off to machines, and that freed us the time and energy to devote to the service economy. But the AI age looks geared to do the same for most brain work. Sure, there will still be some brain work for people to do, just as there is still some physical work for people to do. But if the pace of technological advancement continues, the overwhelming majority of the jobs look set to be gone for good this time. We’ll be as redundant as horses.
There are a million things that could get in the way of all this. One of them being that war breaks out and we no longer have the stability to sustain the massive data networks that AI requires in order to function.
Another thing I wonder about is that, if we all end up on Universal Basic Income, as more and more people are predicting, would that actually lead to a massive spike in birth rates? The low birth rates of the present have largely to do with people wanting to fulfill their lives with career work rather than parenting work. With career work suddenly gone and everyone looking for meaningful life fulfillment without it being coupled to earning a living, I suspect many people would suddenly find starting a family a very desirable option all over again.
Who knows: maybe the robots will keep us occupied in the environmental sector: we’ll make tons of jobs to do that involve gathering and sequestering carbon, and cleaning up the oceans.
It’s good to have work to do, not necessarily so good to have a job.
a) Thank you!
b) Be careful what you wish for.
c) Oh I know how; I just think better and don’t press “Submit Comment.”
Ho yus, that’s a brilliant plan. Snort.
There’s actually inexhaustible amounts of work to be done, it’s just that most doesn’t count in economic estimations and calculations, because it doesn’t pay. I’ve never not worked, but I’m mostly unpaid.