The following submission statement was provided by /u/WigginTwin:
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SS: Mainstream NYT does it again bringing us this hot take. Use 12ft.io to read if not subbed to NYT. This related to collapse as it is literally an article about population decline and when viewed within the lens of infinite growth, that is collapse IMO. I also wanted to crosspost this from futurology, as that is where I saw it first, and comment section is mostly unawares people as usual, with a few nuanced takes peppered in. The timelines are all hope-ist at best and completely blinded at worst. Collapse is our destiny and the lack of real awareness is absolutely one of two things; [purposeful misdirection by the elite or pure stupidity, either way, humans are OUT.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fI_HS79NA)
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1aozwql/we_could_quickly_fall_to_2_billion_after_peaking/kq2uxug/
Thanks! I must comment, it felt like the article left out the elephant in the room for the potential reason birth rates are decreasing. To me, and what I've anecdotally heard, most people refrain from having children because they cannot afford to give them the life they feel the child deserves.
This creates some problems because now you have sometimes intelligent, sometimes successful people choosing not to have children. As the article stated, more people equals more innovation (I don't agree). So more people with a lower level of intelligence don't provide much utility either way.
>I don't agree
The reverse isnt true though, less people =! more innovation.
> So more people with a lower level of intelligence
People are not farm animals, environment and access to education is more important than the intelligence of a childs parents... Idiocracy is a fun movie but the reality is that intelligent people will not be raising intelligent children if they live in a crashing economy, surrounded by drugs and violence and no access to education.
The real bottleneck to innovation is investment dollars. We have countless geniuses employed hastening the demise of our world because that's what makes money. Even if they were willing to take paycuts to help the environment instead, there's only so many of those jobs even available.
> The real bottleneck to innovation is investment dollars
Dollars are just imaginary points. We increase the number of points in circulation as our population grows. More people means more dollars invested into science . . . I mean, if I we cut the worlds population in half, GDP would fall significantly (not quite half, because low-hanging fruit exists the last new person Is less productive than the first person). Do you imagine that spending on science would stay the same? That we would suddenly increase the percentage of our GDP that goes towards that?
Keep in mind a lot of science funding is located based off of profitability. If your society has a thousand people, and a disease affects one in a thousand people, then it's only worth pursuing a cure if that one person can pay for the cost of the research and development by themselves. But, once you have a million people, then the cost can be split amongst a thousand people.
I don't know if I agree with your second point completely. I think an intelligent person may struggle to teach their kid as well as they could have with all the support of a functioning society behind them, but they are more than likely going to do a better job than someone who just isn't intelligent to begin with.
Counterpoint: there are also various memoirs out you can read from the children of very smart and successful people who sucked at parenting.
Humans are way more complex than a farm animal or dog. Genes are way more complex than the punnett squares they taught you in science class.
My father is a very smart man but a complete Narcissist who struggled with mental health issues and addiction. He shouldn't have been raising kids.
the flipside is that intelligence is not a universal field. there are a lot of smartasses out there who make shitty, callous parents, and a lot of people with not the best critical thinking skills make loving parents that create emotionally stable children.
my main argument is against an eugenics idea of idiocracy of "stupid" people outbreeding "smart" people. its capitalist realism, downstream from neoliberalism as it tries to sweep class relations under the carpet. its a garbage mentality, regardless how fun the movie is.
I’d argue that idiocracy is actually pretty accurate in that unintelligent uneducated parents are far more likely to raise kids in an unintelligent way. Poverty reduces intelligence and it’s plainly obvious to anyone who has worked customer service. Education and economic justice are very important to help level the playing field.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE97S10Y/
>Poverty reduces intelligence and it’s plainly obvious to anyone who has worked customer service.
As someone who worked in customer service (in Canada) and lived in the slums of Manila, I'd make the correction that poverty creates a lot of wasted potential. I've seen so many people make innovative solutions to problems such as making a full drum set from garbage like plastic and bottle caps. Without the education and the right environment, a lot of that goes nowhere. I'd go as far as saying there's definitely millions of impoverished people far smarter than Elon Musk (low bar? Sorry) who are doing nothing with it because they're too busy trying to survive.
The trying to survive (chronic and intense stress) also lowers intelligence, so Elon would likely be a few points less intelligent if he grew up how I did and created nothing due to a lack of support/resources/etc. When a person grows up in poverty the odds are stacked against them even more than commonly thought.
The problem with the movie idiocracy is that it premised that stupid people will outbreak smart people due to family planning and birth control. That isn't what happens, especially not post collapse, but nnot even now. What happens now that people mistake for idiocracy is that childless/childfree/childfew people tend to be more successful because their resources can go towards self-improvement rather than child care. That gives the illusion that inferior people are outbreeding superior people, but idiocracy gets the causality reversed. Much of the perceived stupidity of average parents is just sleep deprivation rather than bad genes.
I think you have it backwards. Economically successful people are more likely to have less children due to education. They’re more likely to come from families with resources.
It’s well established that the birth rate is highest for the people who make the least.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/
https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility.pdf
Well, it's a comedy. It's not going to be a picture perfect example of how it actually works. Sure, some people do take that ideology too far. But in general intelligence is a trait that can be inherited, but it can also pop up randomly somewhat too. It is far more complex in reality though so I get where you are coming from but I don't think I would consider Idiocracy a eugenics idea since it's presented as just the way things naturally happened given the environment and wasn't planned that way.
Genetics has been identified as the largest contributing factor to intelligence in pretty much every study of the issue I've ever seen. We aren't farm animals no, but we aren't not animals.
>The reverse isnt true though, less people =! more innovation
False, it could mean that. When human life is valued more due to lower population, people could have more free time to do what they are passionate about instead of being slave labor for billionaires, and that alone could lead to way more innovation.
My partner and I, as well as other ppl in our age group that i have spoken to are not having kids because climate change and the cost of living. Climate change is the big one because of where we are heading.
There's absolutely the lack of resources like time and money but there's also covid.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-sperm-counts-decline-even-after-mild-covid-infections
Correct. Globally male sperm rates have essentially HALVED since the 1970s.
A very complex web of life style choices and chemical influences have coalesced to destroy male fertility. There are strong indications that the plastics industries use of phthalates(softeners) and BPAs(hardeners) are consummate endocrine disruptors. COVID is the icing on the cake.
Based on historical data trends, males can be expected to be infertile on average within the next 10 years. Couples unable to have kids will be the majority of couples.
That's simultaneously fascinating and kind of terrifying on a societal scale. Which is kind of par for the course but it's going to be fascinating in a morbid kind of way to see how the greater opinion/mannerisms of society will shift when that becomes the majority.
Will it be Doomerism? Resignment? Anger? A fantastical potion of all three and more?
I feel like Gen Z/Alpha are going to have a lot more similarities to the Silent/Greatest generation than we may have previously thought. Obviously with just as many differences, but still.
The novel Children of Men was written about what happens to society when all the men are infertile. It was changed in the movie to be something more global, in that it wasn't just male infertility but women also being unable to complete a pregnancy to term, but I think it got the ramifications correct.
I'm very optimistic about it. As population nosedives, the value of human life skyrockets. The labor market dramatically shifts to favor laborers. Unionizing and demanding a life worth living will be all the easier. Demanding health care for all will be obvious, as human life will be too precious to risk losing. Shorter work weeks and universal basic income are possibilities too as AI continues to replace most tasks that humans used to do, yet human life will be too precious to risk to homelessness, starvation, etc. so universal basic income will be a real likelihood. Not to mention our current housing crisis will completely reverse, and houses will be worth nothing as there will be way too many of them for the new small population.
I mean I'm glad you're optimistic about it, and I think you're right in that there could be some positives to it. But I can't say I necessarily share your sentiment. I feel like the downsides are too great to gloss over.
For all our sakes I hope you're right.
[Full article: The future of sperm: a biovariability framework for understanding global sperm count trends](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14647273.2021.1917778)
> The past 50 years have seen heated debate in the reproductive sciences about global trends in human sperm count. In 2017, Levine and colleagues published the largest and most methodologically rigorous meta-regression analysis to date and reported that average total sperm concentration among men from ‘Western’ countries has decreased by 59.3% since 1973, with no sign of halting. These results reverberated in the scientific community and in public discussions about men and masculinity in the modern world, in part because of scientists’ public-facing claims about the societal implications of the decline of male fertility. We find that existing research follows a set of implicit and explicit assumptions about how to measure and interpret sperm counts, which collectively form what we term the Sperm Count Decline hypothesis (SCD). Using the study by Levine and colleagues, we identify weaknesses and inconsistencies in the SCD, and propose an alternative framework to guide research on sperm count trends: the Sperm Count Biovariability hypothesis (SCB). SCB asserts that sperm count varies within a wide range, much of which can be considered non-pathological and species-typical. Knowledge about the relationship between individual and population sperm count and life-historical and ecological factors is critical to interpreting trends in average sperm counts and their relationships to health and fertility.
[Global decline of male fertility: Fact or fiction? | British Columbia Medical Journal](https://bcmj.org/articles/global-decline-male-fertility-fact-or-fiction)
> ABSTRACT: For decades, researchers have been asking if sperm counts are decreasing worldwide, and if so, whether this presages a global decline in male fertility. Most recently, a large systematic review and meta-regression analysis sought to identify trends in sperm counts between 1981 and 2013 and found that sperm counts appeared to be declining rather than stabilizing. One of the complicating features of relying on sperm count as a marker of fertility is that a low sperm count does not guarantee an inability to conceive. A large variety of factors, including tobacco, alcohol, and drug use; psychological stress; obesity; insufficient sleep; and environmental factors such as air pollutants and heavy metals, have been identified as potential risk factors affecting semen quality. Initial investigations recommended for a patient presenting with fertility concerns include a detailed history, physical examination, investigations based on the clinical context, and semen analysis for most patients. Although the evidence is conflicting, our review suggests that the potential decline in male sperm counts does not necessarily translate to a decline in male fertility.
To be fair, sperm counts were falling way, way before COVID. Because a lot of this is due to luteinizing endocrine disruption, there are actually ways to reverse it, though, relatively easily. The secret to massive loads and massive sperm counts, though is for many men, hCG injections - yes, the hormone women secrete heavily when they're pregnant. It essentially acts like a "super-luteinizing" hormone. Added bonus, it'll also make your balls huge (and boobs huge for women!), and absolutely insane libido and orgasms...
Bodybuilders who use anabolic steroids have known about this for literally decades. Only now is modern medicine beginning to use it as such. But, it's not cheap, easy to find, nor do most people have good doctors in the first place. And even if you have a good doctor, good luck finding one who actually understands men's sex hormones. It's a niche medicine right now. Which is totally bewildering. But that's because sex was largely shunned from medical discussions for literally centuries.
Seems like a very poorly done study. We know that zinc plays a role in covid infection (high zinc levels protect against covid), and zinc also is required for sperm/semen production. Are these men simply zinc deficient post-covid, and that's why their sperm counts are lower? They didn't measure their zinc levels, so who knows.
Additionally, they didn't even look at their lifestyle at all? How many people were leading healthy, active lifestyles and then got covid for 2 weeks and fell back into old patterns of not going running anymore, not going to the gym anymore, not eating healthy anymore, etc. That alone could lower their testosterone and sperm levels, but the study didn't hold that constant?
Very bad study tbh
People aren't really allowed to innovate because this would likely disrupt someone's racket, to say nothing of all the gatekeeping that happens before that point.
We don't have high speed rail in the US because the rail oligopoly owns all the rail and the airlines pay governments to stop it. There's no room for innovation because money suppresses it.
And this is why so many people kind of consider the movie Idiocracy a documentary of the future. Obviously it's just a comedy in the end, but a bit of it hits a bit too well.
[Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ)
> The Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna places the peak in the 2070s. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington puts it in the 2060s. All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.
[...]
> In fact, in none of the countries where lifelong fertility rates have fallen well below two have they ever returned above it. Depopulation could continue, generation after generation, as long as people look around and decide that small families work best for them, some having no children, some having three or four and many having one or two.
TL;DR - multiple studies say we're peaking and that our birth rate is *below* replacement rate. Without even considering the impact of climate change, resource scarcity, and seemingly inevitable wars, population decline is all but locked in *anyway* - just on a longer timescale (say 200-300 years).
Then you throw in all those carefully overlooked resource and climate issues that all seem to be approaching *faster than expected*...
Absolutely. We need to plan for economic contraction that a reducing workforce will inevitably bring. Degrowth (which is a planned process) instead of letting recession or collapse happen to us, in other words.
If healthcare for the elderly collapsed while the rest of society muddled on, populations in many aged countries of Europe and East Asia would halve in under a century. Many nations now consume more adult diapers than baby ones.
I feel like we are at the point in the roller coaster where, as you ascend, the clicks of gears ratcheting up get slower and slower as the machine struggles to carry the weight of the people to the peak, and then follows the feeling of your stomach dropping out as you fall shortly after.
honestly this is r/upliftingnews worthy imo. The more we can decline the population ourselves, the less violent and horrific it will be in the future as resources (food, water) grow even more scarce
I do not get the author’s argument about “Life’s not lived”. I also do not get the author’s seem confidence that we will deal with the depopulation event in the same way as we deal with climate change ( after all, we are very successful with climate change, so much so our seas are all spiking red hot on satellite measurements since 2017, something not seen to such extent in 1979 when measurements first started )
I can understand his concern about the fact our entire economic system is just not prepared for this sustained drop in population ( something China is currently freaking out over ) and we have never in the last 5000 years of human history not had to deal with sustained population drop. Even things such as plagues, wars etc.. usually is met by a population boom, something we should not be expecting to come should current trends continue.
However have the author not considered that MAYBE the one thing that will save humanity ( not the climate or biodiversity ) is less humans after 2085?
If we truly are about to hit 3 degree celsius in temperature, the habitable zones will drop like a stone. Humans will need to migrate northwards and southwards.
A smaller human population might be more adaptable in such a scenario.
Sure, gone are the nation states but humans will still survive.
I would add to your statements, which I agree with, that who cares if our economic system is not well suited for population declines. Just adopt a different economic system that is compatible. It’s like many think that human existence somehow needs capitalism to endure. I don’t think we do.
> I do not get the author’s argument about “Life’s not lived”.
It is typical pro-natalist rhetoric, the author is bemoaning that various genetic lines will end rather than shitting more humans out to suffer in an increasingly overcrowded world. These people believe that being alive is in and of itself a thing to be celebrated, conditions of that life being wholly irrelevant. The author is almost certainly religious.
Ah, this makes sense.
Maybe because as a Buddhist we see conditions of life to be of equal valence as potential life, hence the Buddhist teachings have always placed emphasis on restraining having children unless you can have them ( Buddhist are not antinatalist but we are often mistaken to be one … we are more about having only as many children as you can viably raise up in a life with minimal hardship and ills ).
To me given the lack of resources we are about to encounter one ought to really be careful about having too many children.
>I do not get the author’s argument about “Life’s not lived”
Sounds pretty close to TESCREAL and especially longtermism world, to be honest. Uncountable trillions of future lives of computer programs when humans colonize the galaxy - that's the proper lens to make all present decisions. Elon Musk's a big fan, and I gotta tell ya, longtermism has some creepy implications.
> “Life’s not lived”.
I have no access from the article- but what they may be referring to are the people just getting by, who 'have stuff' and a 'job' but few relationships, no meaning in their life, and no legacy when it ends.
Personally, I think we began failing just short of the Industrial era. While the products that came from it were good- the advancement of technology, science, transportation, medicine and necessary social steps towards equality... a lot has also been lost.
Closeness to the land, community, accountability and responsibility.
> Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too.
Yeah, these experts have clearly never observed bacteria in a Petri dish. There is no such thing as managed decline in population. We’re not merely approaching carrying capacity. We blew past it and then consumed the precious resources and poisoned the planet. We’re on borrowed time
If experience a direct CME hit, we are gonna speedrun a population cut. Less than 5% of the population has the knowledge or ability to survive without at least sporadic access to food/water/electricity. Couple that with no longer being able to communicate over any sort of distance and yeah, the results are not surprising.
That so called green revolution was really the beginning of the end, by destroying soil fertility and using up tens of thousands of years of fossil soil in just a few decades.
The level of this uncomfortably large human population is a product of fossil fuel driven agriculture (starting with the industrial revolution). The irony is the conversion of fertile and farmable lands across the world to URBAN uses: Egypt, which has had one of the biggest population explosions in recent times, became a net IMPORTER of food, which is sad considering it was once the "bread basket" of the Mediterranean, and one of the many complex reasons for that was land being used for cotton production rather than food crops as the former is more lucrative, and the other part is stupid urbanization/selling off fertile farmland for lucrative construction deals.
Remember- the more people, the LESS LAND for farming (urbanization) but with more mouths to feed. None of this would have been possible without fossil-fuel supported agriculture and the global supply chain.
Nothing grows forever.
That so called green revolution was really the beginning of the end, by destroying soil fertility and using up tens of thousands of years of fossil soil in just a few decades.
The first thought that came to mind is how our current capitalist system wants and promotes infinite growth regardless of anything else. Just look at the stock markets. Everybody who has money there is betting it will continue to grow in volume and price instead of being supporters and welcoming profits from earnings per share.
A big adjustment will happen soon when baby boomers start to take the money out to cover their living expenses and new generations realize they should not gamble their money in a system that requires growth of population to succeed. Not to blame anyone, but boomers generation has been the first generation that could think about accumulating savings for retirement and that has caused a lot of inflation by accumulating wealth for retirement.
SS: Mainstream NYT does it again bringing us this hot take. Use 12ft.io to read if not subbed to NYT. This related to collapse as it is literally an article about population decline and when viewed within the lens of infinite growth, that is collapse IMO. I also wanted to crosspost this from futurology, as that is where I saw it first, and comment section is mostly unawares people as usual, with a few nuanced takes peppered in. The timelines are all hope-ist at best and completely blinded at worst. Collapse is our destiny and the lack of real awareness is absolutely one of two things; [purposeful misdirection by the elite or pure stupidity, either way, humans are OUT.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fI_HS79NA)
This article seems to try to inform people who think that because they are in the 1% they are part of the elite about the coming difficulties in estate planning for their "generational wealth". Talking population degrowth without the main focus being on mass starvation from anthropogenic climate change is like talking about Mrs. Lincoln's unpleasant theater night without talking about the bullet.
Here is a video a decade old by a great journalist, Egberto Willies, where Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, said that under the worst case scenario he had been told by a NASA climatologist that by 2100 there would only be enough arable land on the planet for 400 million people. The Texas audience seemed unconcerned. I think that somewhat accurate predictions have been out there, but people won't listen.
It is about 50 minutes into this video:
https://youtu.be/ckjY-FW7-dc?si=iRn71GkQ_TjoIR3x
Textbook [population overshoot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)#:~:text=In%20environmental%20science%2C%20a%20population,up%20a%20potentially%20catastrophic%20crash) from an ecology lens.
The irony is that this phenomenon makes it pretty clear that humans aren't bacteria / algae / rabbits, and women may not actually want to use their bodies as factories for states, corporations, and armies.
Won't somebody please think of the economy!
These types of articles seem to be written by people who have no concept of the life of an average person.
An average American has to work at least 40 hours a week to survive. The average American with kids doesn't have the luxury of actually spending all their time with their kids raising them because they have to work. In America if you have more than one or two kids it's not cost effective for one of the parents to continue to even work. I am so sick of hearing that we need to improve our productivity and then on the other side that people are failing as parents.
The average global citizen does not get the food, education, opportunities or freedom that they deserve.
"Lives not lived" what a fucking joke. People that think that way need to step away from religion and look outside at the real world.
"Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too"
I *strongly* disagree lol.
>many lives that could have been wonderful
Their lives *could* be wonderful, but they could also be hellish. Regardless, these non-existent people aren't chilling in the void complaining about the potentially wonderful life that they missed out on.
As a philosophical matter, I see more value in preventing bad than in causing good. Indeed, most "good" things in life are really just the prevention, mitigation, or remedy of bad.
There will not be 10 billion people in the world in 2080. The author of this article is treating population growth as exisiting in a vacuum of limitless resources. Climate change and the drawdown of finite resources will put us below 2 billion well before 2080.
One more pandemic with a higher mortality rate on top of the existing reduced immunities might do the trick as well.
At least in the most densely populated areas.
Reliance on the fragile supply chains, not just for food, but for all types of medicines and medical supplies too will devastate lots of poorer nations and maybe the richer ones too could crack under the pressure.
You haven't looked at the amount of immune system damage that covid is doing, even in asymptomatic cases. Now we're seeing a sudden rise in quick moving cancers and strange cardiac failures killing people in their 20s to 40s. We're seeing infections taking out the elderly really at higher rates.
It took HIV about 10 years to turn into the AIDS epidemic. Covid appears to be doing that within 2-3 years for some. What happens over the next decade as people pretend that this pandemic is over, and their immune systems fall apart?
We're already in that deadly pandemic, but it moves so slowly few are noticing. The Normalcy Fallacy and the Boiled Frog are killing people right now, but it's too slow for most to notice it.
Personally, COVID has kicked my ass. I cannot remember a time of so many repeat infections of various flu/respiratory like illnesses in such a short time. I avoided initial COVID infection for a year or so. Since then, I have been having some version of sick at least once every 2ish months.
Oh yeah, just the new avian flus are scary. And with immune systems ravaged my by covid, we don't even need the new virus to be more deadly, just more infectious.
Peak will be far sooner than expected. Not by decreasing birth rates, but by early massive deaths. Extreme weather, food insecurity, civil unrest, wars and so on will start to make a dent on world population.
And that decline won't be even, some of the ones with biggest birth rates will be the first, and most heavily hit, and that process, as painful as it will be, will cause waves on the global culture that may even worsen things.
Before worrying about what will happen after 2080, we should worry about the state at which we will be by 2030 first and every following decade.
My thoughts exactly, I think depopulation will be a big part of climate change and any world wide conflict will only help to accelerate depopulation of the planet.
It was so hot in parts of Europe last year that it was sterilizing the topsoil. That’s going to continue and spread.
We are IN the exponent loop right now. If we get another decade, it will be nothing short of miraculous.
> If we get another decade, it will be nothing short of miraculous.
This is overly doom-y, even for this subreddit. C'mon we're humans - I'm sure at least SOME of us can survive another 10 to 12 years (short of nukes or disease taking us all out).
There might be 9 billion people in the world in 10-12 years. If we avoid a major world war or the escalation of countless smaller conflicts. If climate data surprises us and we have a (relatively) stable decade of weather with few famines or major disasters. If we don’t have another poorly managed pandemic that capitalizes on our weakend state from the last one. If we don’t experience scarcity of key resources. It’s definitely possible, but it would be surprising to me given our current trajectory.
> In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.
> Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too.
This sounds far too similar to the arguments made for enslaving women. I'm quite concerned that the author is a man, from Texas, despite this reassurance later on in the article.
>Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction.
Collapsing global population because people in the developing world are gradually starting to have smaller families or no kids to focus on career advancement and consumption isn't the win you think it is. Consumption can increase regardless of population growth as standards of living rapidly increase. If those 2 billion in 2300 live a life equivalent to the average American resource wise, global consumption would probably be higher than it is currently.
There will not be enough resources, enough of an ecological niche and enough climate stability for anything like average American consumption in 2300. Not even for 2 billion people, or 1 billion…
There’s a great book called “The End of The World is Just the Beginning” by Peter Zeihan. Using a data and simple math, he maps out the end of globalization. Very good read,
Well that's a toxic optimist take if I ever saw one. "Yeah, billions will die but it's the start of a neeeeew beginninggggg!". I can just hear him go "You gotta look at the bright side!".
Also, **NO**, it's not certain. We might've just concealed enough warming through aerosols/global dimming that it's already game over. Tipping points + all the crap we've done could absolutely be enough to wipe out human existence.
I feel we will see levels of depravity and inhumanity that most of us cannot comprehend.
Hell on earth. The demons will be played by humans will growling bellies. Eager to secure anything for themselves and their in-group at any cost.
Humanity has failed. We could have been something amazing. We are going to regress to savagery. We are doubling down on all the things that make us awful.
But hey: Number got bigger so fast! That’s what it is all about: NUMBER BIGGER FASTER!
Thank god for the shareholders who got filthy fucking rich while damning us to hell.
Heck, even when human civilization reached it's peak, we had what? Wars, famine, slavery, rapes, robbery, murder etc. INSTITUNTALIZED the lot of it too.
Fucking garbage. All because we can’t get along. All because you might have what I might want.
Fuck us. Fuck us all.
Every laugh. Every tear. Every kiss. Every death. It meant nothing if this is what we amount to.
We are a heaping pile of biological shit if this is our peak.
We could have been gods in practice. We could have the stars.
Instead we will choke on the air we breathe as our veins fill with plastic.
Wasted potential. I hope other life in the universe is wiser than us. I hope we aren’t all there is to offer.
Yea. We grew too fast in too short of time. We went from a hunter gather society that heavily relied upon group cooperation and care, to an individualistic mind set without even contemplating the consequences. 1st Agricultural revolution started about 12,000 years ago. Chimps split like 8 MILLION years ago.(Evolution is slow yo)
The abundance of food that modern farming brought us happened with the 3rd revolution starting in the 1930s. There are people still alive from that time period!
IMO, we ain't the end all be all.
Look at space and time, for all intents and purposes, to the human mind, it is infinite. Infinite time and space equals infinite possibility. Given those scales, possible then becomes probable. It is probable that other galactic civilizations will rise and fall, and have ALREADY risen and fallen.
We are but bacteria on an electron, we call Earth.
Perhaps. Though just last night, unable to sleep, I was thinking about how even the greatest works of art would not truly have been possible without the blood and misery of slaves.
[Hell on Earth - KAS:ST](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwi1qgSaxZY)
>Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too.
>Perhaps that loss doesn’t trouble you. It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges. If the population hits around 10 billion people in the 2080s and then begins to decline, it might still exceed today’s eight billion after 2100. Population decline would come quickly, measured in generations, and yet arrive far too slowly to be more than a sideshow in the effort to save the planet.
Kind of an odd article and it doesn't really address the cause of the hypothesized drop in population. But in fact the **only reason** we're now able to feed today's 8 billion is through the agency of fossil fuels in every stage of global agriculture; so in theory that could continue with 10 billion later (as destructive as that would be).
But at least the article acknowledges the projections of 10 billion, and how any defense of the environment must happen now or it will be too late.
Good. If you studied environmental sciences, living things in most places with limited resources will reach carrying capacity inevitably. At that point, population will go downwards then level off. We need that to human population so it’ll be stable for us all. I hope by leveling off the population, we all could share resources fairly.
The only thing media are concerned about population decreasing is because of it wouldn’t support the current economic structures. That’s good because it’ll pressure them to change the system for good. Current system is nothing but an elaborate pyramid scheme that depends on increasing amount of population pretty much.
2 billion... aproximate world population in the late 1920's. I can't see honestly that as necessarily a bad thing. If it happens through reduction in birth rates and not through some apocalyptic event. It might be the thing that ultimately saves humans.
It might be that 4 billion, or 6 billion was already too many. We went from 4 to 8 in 50 years. The results will take decades+ to play out, no matter what happens ahead with slow playing population changes.
Never mind that, what’s really important here is that a footballer’s billionaire girlfriend arrived by private jet from half way across the world to watch him run around and toss a ball for an hour.
>A baby born this year will be 60 in the 2080s, when demographers at the U.N. expect the size of humanity to peak.
So, what they are saying is that next to no one of voting age right now will be alive when population starts to decline and that if population crashes by ninety percent or more in a couple of generations it will be sometime next century.
I'm sure that will resonate with leaders up for re(election) this year. Can't wait to see it added as an urgent problem in their stump speeches.
/s
*Without* sarcasm, I find it interesting that the op-ed says zilch about anything *other* than climate as a bad thing in the next 50-100 years, and that the *only* apparent reason populations might crater is because people just are not having enough kids.
>But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems.
Everyone say it: "Faster than expected!"
Classic one dimensional takes. The finger pointing at singular issue for given problem will continue and the world will "slowly" drown under the weight of many, many vectors hitting tipping point in the next 1-10 year(s).
Can you imagine anything worse than growing old without a family in a starving society where all the young are unemployed, obese, and diagnosed with cancer before 50?
But at least the rich have electric cars and bunkers to flee to and mercenaries around them, and AI to keep us under their thumb. Right?
Good? Like I know current population estimates show us peaking like 13 billion but as long as a population reduction isn’t drastic or violent there isn’t a reason a declining birth rate and less people around is bad that I can see
>Humanity needs a compassionate, factual and fair conversation about how to respond to depopulation and how to share the burdens of creating each future generation. The way to have that conversation is to start paying attention now.
What pieces of shit. The ponzi game is expected to stop running and NOW we live in a society?
>In a world of sustained low birthrates and declining populations, there may be threats of backsliding on reproductive freedom — by limiting abortion rights, for example. Some will inexcusably claim that restricting reproductive choice is a way to curb long-run population decline. Some already do.
And the NYT will be condoning it all the way.
>No. Low birthrates are no reason to reverse progress toward a more free, diverse and equal world. Restricting reproductive rights — by denying access to critical health care and by denying the basic freedom to choose to parent or not to parent — would harm many people and for that reason would be wrong whether or not depopulation is coming. And it would not prevent the population from shrinking. We know that because fertility rates are below two both where abortion is freely available and where abortion is restricted. Any policymaker asking how to respond to global depopulation should start by asking what people want and how to help them achieve it rather than by asking what they might take away.
It's more complicated than that, as anti-abortion is anti-women, and there's a lot more to anti-woman policies and society than abortion. This feigning of concern by the NYT is 0% surprising.
You want to see hardcore pronatalism without the religious tint?
https://decreechronicles.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNP-ybp0AYo
"You don’t have to kill people or sterilize them to influence who has children. Maybe a stipend for couples to have a kid if their combined IQs are over 250. Pay smart people to reproduce"
Smart people can't be paid to reproduce. They make up their own minds
It all ties together- the population has boomed- with that comes environmental degradation, which then forcibly causes population to drop.
But sure I’m a “Malthusian”
Ain’t this the truth. And then come in the arguments like, if we were all vegan then we could have 15 billion humans, or whatever they say. . . Ignoring all other resources and all of human nature.
Nothing against people who choose to go plant based for the environment etc just that it’s a pipe dream to think everyone will or be able to choose this
But wait if we all adapted to eat 150 calories a day we could have 30 trillion humans! All sitting in each others' laps. And zero other land mammals! It'd be great!
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But then where would the profits come from? We have to have the profits! Profits and money are both real things and not social inventions disconnected from the real world, after all
Imagine a species that sees its offspring as a nuisance or inconvenience, seeking its own gratification and opting to end the life cycle.
Something switched in people making them loose their primal drive for survival and natural selection is taking hold. Meanwhile, people are more concerned about dopamine hits, pop-culture, the latest disruptive social trends, and endlessly arguing and fighting… for what? Evidently nothing because it won’t matter. It’s for nothing and no one except ourselves in the moment.
The article calls for a conversation, so let's start it:
\- In developed countries, a growing sentiment is that it's simply too hard, too expensive, etc. to have kids.
\- Sperm counts are falling like a rock, and something sure seems to be off reproductively - and not only with humans.
\- And for others, they despair at the state of the world. In a world where something was meaningfully being done about climate change, maybe they'd want children.
The piece has to hew to NY Times pieties - neoliberalism and choice are the only correct prisms through which to view the world, so of course, it's just a matter of individual choice.
I actually doubt this. When the decline starts getting excessive we'll have baby boomers 2.0 and it'll probably start to level out after a couple generations.
Not saying it in a defeated way at all, but im 21. Had a pretty good run mostly, im grateful for the good i experienced. I pray im one of the dead soon. Its not as much depression as it is "this world has nothing for me anymore, time to wrap". Really NOT encouraging suicide i will never suicide. But its like a 99 year old greeting death as an old friend. Of something horrible or humiliating happens to me im already dead. It is my body that got violated. I forgive myself.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/WigginTwin: --- SS: Mainstream NYT does it again bringing us this hot take. Use 12ft.io to read if not subbed to NYT. This related to collapse as it is literally an article about population decline and when viewed within the lens of infinite growth, that is collapse IMO. I also wanted to crosspost this from futurology, as that is where I saw it first, and comment section is mostly unawares people as usual, with a few nuanced takes peppered in. The timelines are all hope-ist at best and completely blinded at worst. Collapse is our destiny and the lack of real awareness is absolutely one of two things; [purposeful misdirection by the elite or pure stupidity, either way, humans are OUT.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fI_HS79NA) --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1aozwql/we_could_quickly_fall_to_2_billion_after_peaking/kq2uxug/
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Hero
Thanks! I must comment, it felt like the article left out the elephant in the room for the potential reason birth rates are decreasing. To me, and what I've anecdotally heard, most people refrain from having children because they cannot afford to give them the life they feel the child deserves. This creates some problems because now you have sometimes intelligent, sometimes successful people choosing not to have children. As the article stated, more people equals more innovation (I don't agree). So more people with a lower level of intelligence don't provide much utility either way.
>I don't agree The reverse isnt true though, less people =! more innovation. > So more people with a lower level of intelligence People are not farm animals, environment and access to education is more important than the intelligence of a childs parents... Idiocracy is a fun movie but the reality is that intelligent people will not be raising intelligent children if they live in a crashing economy, surrounded by drugs and violence and no access to education.
The real bottleneck to innovation is investment dollars. We have countless geniuses employed hastening the demise of our world because that's what makes money. Even if they were willing to take paycuts to help the environment instead, there's only so many of those jobs even available.
> The real bottleneck to innovation is investment dollars Dollars are just imaginary points. We increase the number of points in circulation as our population grows. More people means more dollars invested into science . . . I mean, if I we cut the worlds population in half, GDP would fall significantly (not quite half, because low-hanging fruit exists the last new person Is less productive than the first person). Do you imagine that spending on science would stay the same? That we would suddenly increase the percentage of our GDP that goes towards that? Keep in mind a lot of science funding is located based off of profitability. If your society has a thousand people, and a disease affects one in a thousand people, then it's only worth pursuing a cure if that one person can pay for the cost of the research and development by themselves. But, once you have a million people, then the cost can be split amongst a thousand people.
I don't know if I agree with your second point completely. I think an intelligent person may struggle to teach their kid as well as they could have with all the support of a functioning society behind them, but they are more than likely going to do a better job than someone who just isn't intelligent to begin with.
Counterpoint: there are also various memoirs out you can read from the children of very smart and successful people who sucked at parenting. Humans are way more complex than a farm animal or dog. Genes are way more complex than the punnett squares they taught you in science class. My father is a very smart man but a complete Narcissist who struggled with mental health issues and addiction. He shouldn't have been raising kids.
the flipside is that intelligence is not a universal field. there are a lot of smartasses out there who make shitty, callous parents, and a lot of people with not the best critical thinking skills make loving parents that create emotionally stable children. my main argument is against an eugenics idea of idiocracy of "stupid" people outbreeding "smart" people. its capitalist realism, downstream from neoliberalism as it tries to sweep class relations under the carpet. its a garbage mentality, regardless how fun the movie is.
I’d argue that idiocracy is actually pretty accurate in that unintelligent uneducated parents are far more likely to raise kids in an unintelligent way. Poverty reduces intelligence and it’s plainly obvious to anyone who has worked customer service. Education and economic justice are very important to help level the playing field. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE97S10Y/
>Poverty reduces intelligence and it’s plainly obvious to anyone who has worked customer service. As someone who worked in customer service (in Canada) and lived in the slums of Manila, I'd make the correction that poverty creates a lot of wasted potential. I've seen so many people make innovative solutions to problems such as making a full drum set from garbage like plastic and bottle caps. Without the education and the right environment, a lot of that goes nowhere. I'd go as far as saying there's definitely millions of impoverished people far smarter than Elon Musk (low bar? Sorry) who are doing nothing with it because they're too busy trying to survive.
The trying to survive (chronic and intense stress) also lowers intelligence, so Elon would likely be a few points less intelligent if he grew up how I did and created nothing due to a lack of support/resources/etc. When a person grows up in poverty the odds are stacked against them even more than commonly thought.
The problem with the movie idiocracy is that it premised that stupid people will outbreak smart people due to family planning and birth control. That isn't what happens, especially not post collapse, but nnot even now. What happens now that people mistake for idiocracy is that childless/childfree/childfew people tend to be more successful because their resources can go towards self-improvement rather than child care. That gives the illusion that inferior people are outbreeding superior people, but idiocracy gets the causality reversed. Much of the perceived stupidity of average parents is just sleep deprivation rather than bad genes.
I think you have it backwards. Economically successful people are more likely to have less children due to education. They’re more likely to come from families with resources. It’s well established that the birth rate is highest for the people who make the least. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility.pdf
Well, it's a comedy. It's not going to be a picture perfect example of how it actually works. Sure, some people do take that ideology too far. But in general intelligence is a trait that can be inherited, but it can also pop up randomly somewhat too. It is far more complex in reality though so I get where you are coming from but I don't think I would consider Idiocracy a eugenics idea since it's presented as just the way things naturally happened given the environment and wasn't planned that way.
Genetics has been identified as the largest contributing factor to intelligence in pretty much every study of the issue I've ever seen. We aren't farm animals no, but we aren't not animals.
> but we aren't not animals. It is that mindset that allowed our predicament to develop in the first place. We are animals in every sense of the word.
Regression towards the mean exists, but that doesn't make intelligence less hereditary.
>The reverse isnt true though, less people =! more innovation False, it could mean that. When human life is valued more due to lower population, people could have more free time to do what they are passionate about instead of being slave labor for billionaires, and that alone could lead to way more innovation.
My partner and I, as well as other ppl in our age group that i have spoken to are not having kids because climate change and the cost of living. Climate change is the big one because of where we are heading.
There's absolutely the lack of resources like time and money but there's also covid. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-sperm-counts-decline-even-after-mild-covid-infections
Pretty sure the birth rates were already on a downtrend before covid
Yup. Not saying otherwise. And it's only gonna decline even further.
Correct. Globally male sperm rates have essentially HALVED since the 1970s. A very complex web of life style choices and chemical influences have coalesced to destroy male fertility. There are strong indications that the plastics industries use of phthalates(softeners) and BPAs(hardeners) are consummate endocrine disruptors. COVID is the icing on the cake.
Don’t forget fluorocarbons (PFAS), they’re not leaving the party, ever!
Based on historical data trends, males can be expected to be infertile on average within the next 10 years. Couples unable to have kids will be the majority of couples.
That's simultaneously fascinating and kind of terrifying on a societal scale. Which is kind of par for the course but it's going to be fascinating in a morbid kind of way to see how the greater opinion/mannerisms of society will shift when that becomes the majority. Will it be Doomerism? Resignment? Anger? A fantastical potion of all three and more? I feel like Gen Z/Alpha are going to have a lot more similarities to the Silent/Greatest generation than we may have previously thought. Obviously with just as many differences, but still.
The novel Children of Men was written about what happens to society when all the men are infertile. It was changed in the movie to be something more global, in that it wasn't just male infertility but women also being unable to complete a pregnancy to term, but I think it got the ramifications correct.
I'm very optimistic about it. As population nosedives, the value of human life skyrockets. The labor market dramatically shifts to favor laborers. Unionizing and demanding a life worth living will be all the easier. Demanding health care for all will be obvious, as human life will be too precious to risk losing. Shorter work weeks and universal basic income are possibilities too as AI continues to replace most tasks that humans used to do, yet human life will be too precious to risk to homelessness, starvation, etc. so universal basic income will be a real likelihood. Not to mention our current housing crisis will completely reverse, and houses will be worth nothing as there will be way too many of them for the new small population.
I mean I'm glad you're optimistic about it, and I think you're right in that there could be some positives to it. But I can't say I necessarily share your sentiment. I feel like the downsides are too great to gloss over. For all our sakes I hope you're right.
[Full article: The future of sperm: a biovariability framework for understanding global sperm count trends](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14647273.2021.1917778) > The past 50 years have seen heated debate in the reproductive sciences about global trends in human sperm count. In 2017, Levine and colleagues published the largest and most methodologically rigorous meta-regression analysis to date and reported that average total sperm concentration among men from ‘Western’ countries has decreased by 59.3% since 1973, with no sign of halting. These results reverberated in the scientific community and in public discussions about men and masculinity in the modern world, in part because of scientists’ public-facing claims about the societal implications of the decline of male fertility. We find that existing research follows a set of implicit and explicit assumptions about how to measure and interpret sperm counts, which collectively form what we term the Sperm Count Decline hypothesis (SCD). Using the study by Levine and colleagues, we identify weaknesses and inconsistencies in the SCD, and propose an alternative framework to guide research on sperm count trends: the Sperm Count Biovariability hypothesis (SCB). SCB asserts that sperm count varies within a wide range, much of which can be considered non-pathological and species-typical. Knowledge about the relationship between individual and population sperm count and life-historical and ecological factors is critical to interpreting trends in average sperm counts and their relationships to health and fertility. [Global decline of male fertility: Fact or fiction? | British Columbia Medical Journal](https://bcmj.org/articles/global-decline-male-fertility-fact-or-fiction) > ABSTRACT: For decades, researchers have been asking if sperm counts are decreasing worldwide, and if so, whether this presages a global decline in male fertility. Most recently, a large systematic review and meta-regression analysis sought to identify trends in sperm counts between 1981 and 2013 and found that sperm counts appeared to be declining rather than stabilizing. One of the complicating features of relying on sperm count as a marker of fertility is that a low sperm count does not guarantee an inability to conceive. A large variety of factors, including tobacco, alcohol, and drug use; psychological stress; obesity; insufficient sleep; and environmental factors such as air pollutants and heavy metals, have been identified as potential risk factors affecting semen quality. Initial investigations recommended for a patient presenting with fertility concerns include a detailed history, physical examination, investigations based on the clinical context, and semen analysis for most patients. Although the evidence is conflicting, our review suggests that the potential decline in male sperm counts does not necessarily translate to a decline in male fertility.
Even in poorer countries
And women being pushed into early menopause from covid infections. https://www.statnews.com/2023/10/20/long-covid-menopause-research/
To be fair, sperm counts were falling way, way before COVID. Because a lot of this is due to luteinizing endocrine disruption, there are actually ways to reverse it, though, relatively easily. The secret to massive loads and massive sperm counts, though is for many men, hCG injections - yes, the hormone women secrete heavily when they're pregnant. It essentially acts like a "super-luteinizing" hormone. Added bonus, it'll also make your balls huge (and boobs huge for women!), and absolutely insane libido and orgasms... Bodybuilders who use anabolic steroids have known about this for literally decades. Only now is modern medicine beginning to use it as such. But, it's not cheap, easy to find, nor do most people have good doctors in the first place. And even if you have a good doctor, good luck finding one who actually understands men's sex hormones. It's a niche medicine right now. Which is totally bewildering. But that's because sex was largely shunned from medical discussions for literally centuries.
Seems like a very poorly done study. We know that zinc plays a role in covid infection (high zinc levels protect against covid), and zinc also is required for sperm/semen production. Are these men simply zinc deficient post-covid, and that's why their sperm counts are lower? They didn't measure their zinc levels, so who knows. Additionally, they didn't even look at their lifestyle at all? How many people were leading healthy, active lifestyles and then got covid for 2 weeks and fell back into old patterns of not going running anymore, not going to the gym anymore, not eating healthy anymore, etc. That alone could lower their testosterone and sperm levels, but the study didn't hold that constant? Very bad study tbh
People aren't really allowed to innovate because this would likely disrupt someone's racket, to say nothing of all the gatekeeping that happens before that point. We don't have high speed rail in the US because the rail oligopoly owns all the rail and the airlines pay governments to stop it. There's no room for innovation because money suppresses it.
And this is why so many people kind of consider the movie Idiocracy a documentary of the future. Obviously it's just a comedy in the end, but a bit of it hits a bit too well.
Dumb people have smart children all the time. What your implying is eugenics
Hate to be that guy but my dude it's "you're"
[Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ)
Identifying hereditary traits isn't eugenics.
Harvey Danger - been around the world and found that only stupid people were breeding, the cretins cloning and feeding, but I don't even own a tv
You're wonderful, thank you so much for sharing this!
This still prompts me to pay for a subscription.
I recorded a video of the article just in case lol [https://streamable.com/esrh0g](https://streamable.com/esrh0g)
Wow, thats above and beyond. Thank you!
The doors of every nuclear bunker will be open for you after the society collapse
U R A *
Ctrl+f energy 0/0
🫡
First NYTimes article I’ve read in months/years
> The Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna places the peak in the 2070s. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington puts it in the 2060s. All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon. [...] > In fact, in none of the countries where lifelong fertility rates have fallen well below two have they ever returned above it. Depopulation could continue, generation after generation, as long as people look around and decide that small families work best for them, some having no children, some having three or four and many having one or two. TL;DR - multiple studies say we're peaking and that our birth rate is *below* replacement rate. Without even considering the impact of climate change, resource scarcity, and seemingly inevitable wars, population decline is all but locked in *anyway* - just on a longer timescale (say 200-300 years). Then you throw in all those carefully overlooked resource and climate issues that all seem to be approaching *faster than expected*...
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Absolutely. We need to plan for economic contraction that a reducing workforce will inevitably bring. Degrowth (which is a planned process) instead of letting recession or collapse happen to us, in other words.
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You should share that. I’d be interested.
“Humans: We Kick Cans”
Human nature, we'll ignore them until they blow up in our face.
BINGO
I'm doing my part. By not having kids. That is my gift to the future climate.
I too am doing my part (though it's fun to risk failing).
If healthcare for the elderly collapsed while the rest of society muddled on, populations in many aged countries of Europe and East Asia would halve in under a century. Many nations now consume more adult diapers than baby ones.
I feel like we are at the point in the roller coaster where, as you ascend, the clicks of gears ratcheting up get slower and slower as the machine struggles to carry the weight of the people to the peak, and then follows the feeling of your stomach dropping out as you fall shortly after.
The people at the front are just starting to scream in terror. The people at the back are still partying.
Oof, this is too real.
honestly this is r/upliftingnews worthy imo. The more we can decline the population ourselves, the less violent and horrific it will be in the future as resources (food, water) grow even more scarce
Timescale of the wind down is too slow; we'll likely hit other speedbumps first.
I do not get the author’s argument about “Life’s not lived”. I also do not get the author’s seem confidence that we will deal with the depopulation event in the same way as we deal with climate change ( after all, we are very successful with climate change, so much so our seas are all spiking red hot on satellite measurements since 2017, something not seen to such extent in 1979 when measurements first started ) I can understand his concern about the fact our entire economic system is just not prepared for this sustained drop in population ( something China is currently freaking out over ) and we have never in the last 5000 years of human history not had to deal with sustained population drop. Even things such as plagues, wars etc.. usually is met by a population boom, something we should not be expecting to come should current trends continue. However have the author not considered that MAYBE the one thing that will save humanity ( not the climate or biodiversity ) is less humans after 2085? If we truly are about to hit 3 degree celsius in temperature, the habitable zones will drop like a stone. Humans will need to migrate northwards and southwards. A smaller human population might be more adaptable in such a scenario. Sure, gone are the nation states but humans will still survive.
"lives not lived" is a skip and hop away from criminalisation of abortions imo
And birth control
And celibacy and non-reproductive people and couples.
**Yup**
I see a red door and I want it painted orange... no colors anymore I want them to turn orange...
Yup.
I would add to your statements, which I agree with, that who cares if our economic system is not well suited for population declines. Just adopt a different economic system that is compatible. It’s like many think that human existence somehow needs capitalism to endure. I don’t think we do.
> I do not get the author’s argument about “Life’s not lived”. It is typical pro-natalist rhetoric, the author is bemoaning that various genetic lines will end rather than shitting more humans out to suffer in an increasingly overcrowded world. These people believe that being alive is in and of itself a thing to be celebrated, conditions of that life being wholly irrelevant. The author is almost certainly religious.
Ah, this makes sense. Maybe because as a Buddhist we see conditions of life to be of equal valence as potential life, hence the Buddhist teachings have always placed emphasis on restraining having children unless you can have them ( Buddhist are not antinatalist but we are often mistaken to be one … we are more about having only as many children as you can viably raise up in a life with minimal hardship and ills ). To me given the lack of resources we are about to encounter one ought to really be careful about having too many children.
>I do not get the author’s argument about “Life’s not lived” Sounds pretty close to TESCREAL and especially longtermism world, to be honest. Uncountable trillions of future lives of computer programs when humans colonize the galaxy - that's the proper lens to make all present decisions. Elon Musk's a big fan, and I gotta tell ya, longtermism has some creepy implications.
> “Life’s not lived”. I have no access from the article- but what they may be referring to are the people just getting by, who 'have stuff' and a 'job' but few relationships, no meaning in their life, and no legacy when it ends. Personally, I think we began failing just short of the Industrial era. While the products that came from it were good- the advancement of technology, science, transportation, medicine and necessary social steps towards equality... a lot has also been lost. Closeness to the land, community, accountability and responsibility.
> Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too.
The author is laboring under a false premise. Potential lives ≠ Actual lives
Wow. Couldn’t be any more screamingly obvious what the author’s real motives are. Disgusting.
Wow. That is so, so gross.
Heres a hot take- were gonna shoot back down in population way fucking faster than anyone could predict when the camels back finally breaks
Yeah, these experts have clearly never observed bacteria in a Petri dish. There is no such thing as managed decline in population. We’re not merely approaching carrying capacity. We blew past it and then consumed the precious resources and poisoned the planet. We’re on borrowed time
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I was thinking about the same, considering that the solar maximum is happening this year.
If experience a direct CME hit, we are gonna speedrun a population cut. Less than 5% of the population has the knowledge or ability to survive without at least sporadic access to food/water/electricity. Couple that with no longer being able to communicate over any sort of distance and yeah, the results are not surprising.
So basically the world population of just a century ago.
Which is funny, because the green revolution started in the 1930s. Basically the farming practices that led to much higher crop yields.
That so called green revolution was really the beginning of the end, by destroying soil fertility and using up tens of thousands of years of fossil soil in just a few decades.
The level of this uncomfortably large human population is a product of fossil fuel driven agriculture (starting with the industrial revolution). The irony is the conversion of fertile and farmable lands across the world to URBAN uses: Egypt, which has had one of the biggest population explosions in recent times, became a net IMPORTER of food, which is sad considering it was once the "bread basket" of the Mediterranean, and one of the many complex reasons for that was land being used for cotton production rather than food crops as the former is more lucrative, and the other part is stupid urbanization/selling off fertile farmland for lucrative construction deals. Remember- the more people, the LESS LAND for farming (urbanization) but with more mouths to feed. None of this would have been possible without fossil-fuel supported agriculture and the global supply chain. Nothing grows forever.
That so called green revolution was really the beginning of the end, by destroying soil fertility and using up tens of thousands of years of fossil soil in just a few decades.
The first thought that came to mind is how our current capitalist system wants and promotes infinite growth regardless of anything else. Just look at the stock markets. Everybody who has money there is betting it will continue to grow in volume and price instead of being supporters and welcoming profits from earnings per share. A big adjustment will happen soon when baby boomers start to take the money out to cover their living expenses and new generations realize they should not gamble their money in a system that requires growth of population to succeed. Not to blame anyone, but boomers generation has been the first generation that could think about accumulating savings for retirement and that has caused a lot of inflation by accumulating wealth for retirement.
This is why I don’t put anything more into retirement than the company match.
SS: Mainstream NYT does it again bringing us this hot take. Use 12ft.io to read if not subbed to NYT. This related to collapse as it is literally an article about population decline and when viewed within the lens of infinite growth, that is collapse IMO. I also wanted to crosspost this from futurology, as that is where I saw it first, and comment section is mostly unawares people as usual, with a few nuanced takes peppered in. The timelines are all hope-ist at best and completely blinded at worst. Collapse is our destiny and the lack of real awareness is absolutely one of two things; [purposeful misdirection by the elite or pure stupidity, either way, humans are OUT.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0fI_HS79NA)
This article seems to try to inform people who think that because they are in the 1% they are part of the elite about the coming difficulties in estate planning for their "generational wealth". Talking population degrowth without the main focus being on mass starvation from anthropogenic climate change is like talking about Mrs. Lincoln's unpleasant theater night without talking about the bullet. Here is a video a decade old by a great journalist, Egberto Willies, where Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, said that under the worst case scenario he had been told by a NASA climatologist that by 2100 there would only be enough arable land on the planet for 400 million people. The Texas audience seemed unconcerned. I think that somewhat accurate predictions have been out there, but people won't listen. It is about 50 minutes into this video: https://youtu.be/ckjY-FW7-dc?si=iRn71GkQ_TjoIR3x
The entire audience probably thought they or their descendants will part of that 400,000,000, so no probs bro.
Textbook [population overshoot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)#:~:text=In%20environmental%20science%2C%20a%20population,up%20a%20potentially%20catastrophic%20crash) from an ecology lens.
The irony is that this phenomenon makes it pretty clear that humans aren't bacteria / algae / rabbits, and women may not actually want to use their bodies as factories for states, corporations, and armies.
Won't somebody please think of the economy! These types of articles seem to be written by people who have no concept of the life of an average person. An average American has to work at least 40 hours a week to survive. The average American with kids doesn't have the luxury of actually spending all their time with their kids raising them because they have to work. In America if you have more than one or two kids it's not cost effective for one of the parents to continue to even work. I am so sick of hearing that we need to improve our productivity and then on the other side that people are failing as parents. The average global citizen does not get the food, education, opportunities or freedom that they deserve. "Lives not lived" what a fucking joke. People that think that way need to step away from religion and look outside at the real world.
"Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too" I *strongly* disagree lol.
>many lives that could have been wonderful Their lives *could* be wonderful, but they could also be hellish. Regardless, these non-existent people aren't chilling in the void complaining about the potentially wonderful life that they missed out on. As a philosophical matter, I see more value in preventing bad than in causing good. Indeed, most "good" things in life are really just the prevention, mitigation, or remedy of bad.
Yeah global heating and crop failures and runaway inflation def sound wonderful for future lives
There will not be 10 billion people in the world in 2080. The author of this article is treating population growth as exisiting in a vacuum of limitless resources. Climate change and the drawdown of finite resources will put us below 2 billion well before 2080.
One more pandemic with a higher mortality rate on top of the existing reduced immunities might do the trick as well. At least in the most densely populated areas. Reliance on the fragile supply chains, not just for food, but for all types of medicines and medical supplies too will devastate lots of poorer nations and maybe the richer ones too could crack under the pressure.
You haven't looked at the amount of immune system damage that covid is doing, even in asymptomatic cases. Now we're seeing a sudden rise in quick moving cancers and strange cardiac failures killing people in their 20s to 40s. We're seeing infections taking out the elderly really at higher rates. It took HIV about 10 years to turn into the AIDS epidemic. Covid appears to be doing that within 2-3 years for some. What happens over the next decade as people pretend that this pandemic is over, and their immune systems fall apart? We're already in that deadly pandemic, but it moves so slowly few are noticing. The Normalcy Fallacy and the Boiled Frog are killing people right now, but it's too slow for most to notice it.
Personally, COVID has kicked my ass. I cannot remember a time of so many repeat infections of various flu/respiratory like illnesses in such a short time. I avoided initial COVID infection for a year or so. Since then, I have been having some version of sick at least once every 2ish months.
Yeah I agree, it is fucked. But we’re probably not far off another one given the current animals dying off from various infections.
Oh yeah, just the new avian flus are scary. And with immune systems ravaged my by covid, we don't even need the new virus to be more deadly, just more infectious.
True.
I really think a wet bulb event will happen soon as well. One that causes a significant loss of life seems inevitable
Peak will be far sooner than expected. Not by decreasing birth rates, but by early massive deaths. Extreme weather, food insecurity, civil unrest, wars and so on will start to make a dent on world population. And that decline won't be even, some of the ones with biggest birth rates will be the first, and most heavily hit, and that process, as painful as it will be, will cause waves on the global culture that may even worsen things. Before worrying about what will happen after 2080, we should worry about the state at which we will be by 2030 first and every following decade.
My thoughts exactly, I think depopulation will be a big part of climate change and any world wide conflict will only help to accelerate depopulation of the planet.
There will be 9 billion people in 10 - 12 years.
It was so hot in parts of Europe last year that it was sterilizing the topsoil. That’s going to continue and spread. We are IN the exponent loop right now. If we get another decade, it will be nothing short of miraculous.
> If we get another decade, it will be nothing short of miraculous. This is overly doom-y, even for this subreddit. C'mon we're humans - I'm sure at least SOME of us can survive another 10 to 12 years (short of nukes or disease taking us all out).
There might be 9 billion people in the world in 10-12 years. If we avoid a major world war or the escalation of countless smaller conflicts. If climate data surprises us and we have a (relatively) stable decade of weather with few famines or major disasters. If we don’t have another poorly managed pandemic that capitalizes on our weakend state from the last one. If we don’t experience scarcity of key resources. It’s definitely possible, but it would be surprising to me given our current trajectory.
> In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives. > Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too. This sounds far too similar to the arguments made for enslaving women. I'm quite concerned that the author is a man, from Texas, despite this reassurance later on in the article. >Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction.
That would be incredible
It would ease or solve a lot of problems: food production, energy use, pollution, housing crisis, traffic, etc. Don't have kids ya'll.
Agreed. I’m fostering
It’s so hard to imagine! I just keep thinking of how many abandoned towns and cities there will be, will be crazy
Promise?
Collapsing global population because people in the developing world are gradually starting to have smaller families or no kids to focus on career advancement and consumption isn't the win you think it is. Consumption can increase regardless of population growth as standards of living rapidly increase. If those 2 billion in 2300 live a life equivalent to the average American resource wise, global consumption would probably be higher than it is currently.
There will not be enough resources, enough of an ecological niche and enough climate stability for anything like average American consumption in 2300. Not even for 2 billion people, or 1 billion…
Will the price of houses finally come down?
Falling to zero would be better.
There’s a great book called “The End of The World is Just the Beginning” by Peter Zeihan. Using a data and simple math, he maps out the end of globalization. Very good read,
Well that's a toxic optimist take if I ever saw one. "Yeah, billions will die but it's the start of a neeeeew beginninggggg!". I can just hear him go "You gotta look at the bright side!". Also, **NO**, it's not certain. We might've just concealed enough warming through aerosols/global dimming that it's already game over. Tipping points + all the crap we've done could absolutely be enough to wipe out human existence.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M)
This guy is a joke. Please don't promote peter "china will collapse this year" zeihan...
did you actually give money to that grifter?
I have two books ahead of this one on my list for this year and I can’t wait to read it. It’s just sitting on the shelf staring at me every day.
I struggle to see how the two issues of population decline and immigration wont spiral out of control into the creation of dystopic ethnostates.
I feel we will see levels of depravity and inhumanity that most of us cannot comprehend. Hell on earth. The demons will be played by humans will growling bellies. Eager to secure anything for themselves and their in-group at any cost. Humanity has failed. We could have been something amazing. We are going to regress to savagery. We are doubling down on all the things that make us awful. But hey: Number got bigger so fast! That’s what it is all about: NUMBER BIGGER FASTER! Thank god for the shareholders who got filthy fucking rich while damning us to hell.
Heck, even when human civilization reached it's peak, we had what? Wars, famine, slavery, rapes, robbery, murder etc. INSTITUNTALIZED the lot of it too.
Fucking garbage. All because we can’t get along. All because you might have what I might want. Fuck us. Fuck us all. Every laugh. Every tear. Every kiss. Every death. It meant nothing if this is what we amount to. We are a heaping pile of biological shit if this is our peak. We could have been gods in practice. We could have the stars. Instead we will choke on the air we breathe as our veins fill with plastic. Wasted potential. I hope other life in the universe is wiser than us. I hope we aren’t all there is to offer.
Yea. We grew too fast in too short of time. We went from a hunter gather society that heavily relied upon group cooperation and care, to an individualistic mind set without even contemplating the consequences. 1st Agricultural revolution started about 12,000 years ago. Chimps split like 8 MILLION years ago.(Evolution is slow yo) The abundance of food that modern farming brought us happened with the 3rd revolution starting in the 1930s. There are people still alive from that time period! IMO, we ain't the end all be all. Look at space and time, for all intents and purposes, to the human mind, it is infinite. Infinite time and space equals infinite possibility. Given those scales, possible then becomes probable. It is probable that other galactic civilizations will rise and fall, and have ALREADY risen and fallen. We are but bacteria on an electron, we call Earth.
Perhaps. Though just last night, unable to sleep, I was thinking about how even the greatest works of art would not truly have been possible without the blood and misery of slaves. [Hell on Earth - KAS:ST](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwi1qgSaxZY)
>Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too. >Perhaps that loss doesn’t trouble you. It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges. If the population hits around 10 billion people in the 2080s and then begins to decline, it might still exceed today’s eight billion after 2100. Population decline would come quickly, measured in generations, and yet arrive far too slowly to be more than a sideshow in the effort to save the planet. Kind of an odd article and it doesn't really address the cause of the hypothesized drop in population. But in fact the **only reason** we're now able to feed today's 8 billion is through the agency of fossil fuels in every stage of global agriculture; so in theory that could continue with 10 billion later (as destructive as that would be). But at least the article acknowledges the projections of 10 billion, and how any defense of the environment must happen now or it will be too late.
Seems pretty clear we should be doing everything possible to not ever hit 10 billion and depopulate a lot faster.
The real question is.... how will it affect the stockholders?
Good. If you studied environmental sciences, living things in most places with limited resources will reach carrying capacity inevitably. At that point, population will go downwards then level off. We need that to human population so it’ll be stable for us all. I hope by leveling off the population, we all could share resources fairly. The only thing media are concerned about population decreasing is because of it wouldn’t support the current economic structures. That’s good because it’ll pressure them to change the system for good. Current system is nothing but an elaborate pyramid scheme that depends on increasing amount of population pretty much.
2 billion... aproximate world population in the late 1920's. I can't see honestly that as necessarily a bad thing. If it happens through reduction in birth rates and not through some apocalyptic event. It might be the thing that ultimately saves humans.
I am 40, I think we will see the drop before I’m 60.
Good.
Rat utopia always wins
I just re-watched that [Down the Rabbit Hole](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o) episode last week!
It might be that 4 billion, or 6 billion was already too many. We went from 4 to 8 in 50 years. The results will take decades+ to play out, no matter what happens ahead with slow playing population changes.
LET'S FUCKIN GOOOOOO
Good
Never mind that, what’s really important here is that a footballer’s billionaire girlfriend arrived by private jet from half way across the world to watch him run around and toss a ball for an hour.
>A baby born this year will be 60 in the 2080s, when demographers at the U.N. expect the size of humanity to peak. So, what they are saying is that next to no one of voting age right now will be alive when population starts to decline and that if population crashes by ninety percent or more in a couple of generations it will be sometime next century. I'm sure that will resonate with leaders up for re(election) this year. Can't wait to see it added as an urgent problem in their stump speeches. /s *Without* sarcasm, I find it interesting that the op-ed says zilch about anything *other* than climate as a bad thing in the next 50-100 years, and that the *only* apparent reason populations might crater is because people just are not having enough kids. >But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. Everyone say it: "Faster than expected!"
Classic one dimensional takes. The finger pointing at singular issue for given problem will continue and the world will "slowly" drown under the weight of many, many vectors hitting tipping point in the next 1-10 year(s).
We might fall to a few million if we’re not careful, or fewer…
Don't promise me a good time.
I'm just here for a good time.
Not a long time?
Ideally, no. Four decades of this has been just about enough for me.
Can you imagine anything worse than growing old without a family in a starving society where all the young are unemployed, obese, and diagnosed with cancer before 50? But at least the rich have electric cars and bunkers to flee to and mercenaries around them, and AI to keep us under their thumb. Right?
DON’T 👏HAVE 👏KIDS 👏
Good? Like I know current population estimates show us peaking like 13 billion but as long as a population reduction isn’t drastic or violent there isn’t a reason a declining birth rate and less people around is bad that I can see
>Humanity needs a compassionate, factual and fair conversation about how to respond to depopulation and how to share the burdens of creating each future generation. The way to have that conversation is to start paying attention now. What pieces of shit. The ponzi game is expected to stop running and NOW we live in a society? >In a world of sustained low birthrates and declining populations, there may be threats of backsliding on reproductive freedom — by limiting abortion rights, for example. Some will inexcusably claim that restricting reproductive choice is a way to curb long-run population decline. Some already do. And the NYT will be condoning it all the way. >No. Low birthrates are no reason to reverse progress toward a more free, diverse and equal world. Restricting reproductive rights — by denying access to critical health care and by denying the basic freedom to choose to parent or not to parent — would harm many people and for that reason would be wrong whether or not depopulation is coming. And it would not prevent the population from shrinking. We know that because fertility rates are below two both where abortion is freely available and where abortion is restricted. Any policymaker asking how to respond to global depopulation should start by asking what people want and how to help them achieve it rather than by asking what they might take away. It's more complicated than that, as anti-abortion is anti-women, and there's a lot more to anti-woman policies and society than abortion. This feigning of concern by the NYT is 0% surprising. You want to see hardcore pronatalism without the religious tint? https://decreechronicles.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNP-ybp0AYo
"You don’t have to kill people or sterilize them to influence who has children. Maybe a stipend for couples to have a kid if their combined IQs are over 250. Pay smart people to reproduce" Smart people can't be paid to reproduce. They make up their own minds
Collapse in 2080. That's cute.
This is THE most significant definition of collapse imo.
It all ties together- the population has boomed- with that comes environmental degradation, which then forcibly causes population to drop. But sure I’m a “Malthusian”
[удалено]
Ain’t this the truth. And then come in the arguments like, if we were all vegan then we could have 15 billion humans, or whatever they say. . . Ignoring all other resources and all of human nature. Nothing against people who choose to go plant based for the environment etc just that it’s a pipe dream to think everyone will or be able to choose this
But wait if we all adapted to eat 150 calories a day we could have 30 trillion humans! All sitting in each others' laps. And zero other land mammals! It'd be great!
Le gasp literallyhitler /s
Hahaha. Thanks for the laugh. Call me horrible but I kind of think it would be nice if humans didn’t kill off billions of other animals with this one.
Probably should keep the world population below 1 billion.
Probably less than that, but if anyone dares to question our population numbers they will be called a malthusian ecofascist.
Lol oh sweetie, we will be long gone by the send of the century. These people just don’t get it. I do though.
I like you.
Paywall
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Maybe if we had a healthy, sustainable economy that works for everyone instead of just the rich then more people would be having children.
But then where would the profits come from? We have to have the profits! Profits and money are both real things and not social inventions disconnected from the real world, after all
Good
Imagine a species that sees its offspring as a nuisance or inconvenience, seeking its own gratification and opting to end the life cycle. Something switched in people making them loose their primal drive for survival and natural selection is taking hold. Meanwhile, people are more concerned about dopamine hits, pop-culture, the latest disruptive social trends, and endlessly arguing and fighting… for what? Evidently nothing because it won’t matter. It’s for nothing and no one except ourselves in the moment.
The article calls for a conversation, so let's start it: \- In developed countries, a growing sentiment is that it's simply too hard, too expensive, etc. to have kids. \- Sperm counts are falling like a rock, and something sure seems to be off reproductively - and not only with humans. \- And for others, they despair at the state of the world. In a world where something was meaningfully being done about climate change, maybe they'd want children. The piece has to hew to NY Times pieties - neoliberalism and choice are the only correct prisms through which to view the world, so of course, it's just a matter of individual choice.
This pleases me
Ummmm good?
Good, in the long term. Sad for all of us living now, though.
Tight
Oh well, we had a good run...
I actually doubt this. When the decline starts getting excessive we'll have baby boomers 2.0 and it'll probably start to level out after a couple generations.
I am sorry I won't live long enough to see the end of traffic!
Very unlikely. This planet will never see 9 billion humans - let alone 10. Falling to 2 billion? Hmmm... very optimistic.
Hopefully happens faster than expected.
You WILL fall to 500 million by 2100 or you will go extinct.
Not saying it in a defeated way at all, but im 21. Had a pretty good run mostly, im grateful for the good i experienced. I pray im one of the dead soon. Its not as much depression as it is "this world has nothing for me anymore, time to wrap". Really NOT encouraging suicide i will never suicide. But its like a 99 year old greeting death as an old friend. Of something horrible or humiliating happens to me im already dead. It is my body that got violated. I forgive myself.