Continuing my discussion of the recent upsurge in pro-natalism, I want to talk about the idea that, unless birth rates rise, society will face a big problem caring for old people. In this post, I’m going to focus on aged care in the narrow sense, rather than issues like retirement income, which depend crucially on social policy.
Looking at Australian data on location of death, I found that around 30 per cent of people die in aged care, and that the mean time spent in aged care is around three years, implying an average of one year per person. Staffing requirements in Australia amount to aroundone full-time staff member per residents. So the “average” Australian requires about one full-time working year of aged care in their lifetime, or about 2.5 per cent of a working life. This is, as it happens, about the proportion of the Australian workforce currently engaged in aged care.
But what if each generation were only half the size of the preceding one? In that case, the share of the labour force required for aged care would double, to around 5 per cent.
If you find this scary, you might want to consider that children aged 0-5 require more care than old people, and for a much longer time. Because this care is provided within the family, and without any monetary return, it doesn’t appear in national accounts. But a pro-natalist policy requires that people have more children than they choose to at present. To the extent that this is achieved by subsidising the associated labour costs (for example, through publicly funded childcare), it will rapidly offset the eventual benefit in having more workers available to provide aged care.
And that’s only preschool children. There’s a significant childcare element in school education, as we saw when schools closed at the beginning of the pandemic. And school-age children still require plenty of parental care. (I’ll talk about education more generally in a later post, I hope).
Repeating myself, none of this is a problem when people choose to have children, more or less aware of the work this will involve (though, as everyone who has been through it knows, new parents are in for a big shock). But it’s clear by now that voluntary choices will produce a below-replacement birth rate. Policies aimed at changing those choices will have costs that exceed their benefits.
{ 55 comments }
kent 01.17.24 at 10:46 pm
“But it’s clear by now that voluntary choices will produce a below-replacement birth rate.”
It seems that in some circumstances, “choices” are held to be “voluntary” and more-or-less unquestionable. But in other cirumstances, “choices” are highly questionable and held to be due to some social, political, or other factors that one may hope to ameliorate.
Why the defeatism on this particular issue? Why may we not hold out hope that the birth rate may increase at such time as the human condition is improved beyond what is possible under the conditions of the current (capitalist / neoliberal / antifeminist / racist / insert your own term of abuse) regime? Why not urge us, one and all, to work proactively to help create such a world?
Alex SL 01.17.24 at 11:30 pm
What frustrates me about all of the arguments for growing population to infinity, be it “we’d get more geniuses”, “we need to care for the elderly”, “we need to grow our economy”, “we need to pay for pensions”, or whatever else they come up with, is that none of them address the simple fact that infinity people can’t be fed, clothed, and housed. The growth has to stop at some point or we collapse our global technological civilisation right after driving over 90% of all species to extinction. Yes, at the point where we stop growth, there may be consequences such as economic contraction and sad cities with lots of old and few young people. But not stopping growth now because it is easier to push the consequences of not growing into the future will only postpone and increase the problem, not solve it. It is moral cowardice.
The natalists never have a solution. They either pretend that infinity people won’t be a problem because we will find some currently unspecified fix for that (cornucopianism), or they simply go lalala I can’t hear you. Easier not to think about resource limits and the disappearance of the natural environment, I guess.
Of course, and as implied in the post, it also seems odd to think that aged care or pensions wouldn’t be affordable with fewer births. What do we have all our industrialisation and mechanisation for? It isn’t as if 90% of us are still busy with growing food and weaving cloth. Do we really need millions of people unemployed, underemployed, or trying to ‘grind’ in the gig economy, or could we perhaps pay them a decent, stable wage to take up care? Unless we are talking on the order of 0.2 births per family, the problem isn’t the number of children, it is what the wealthy among us are willing to pay for, like always.
TMooreTXK 01.17.24 at 11:31 pm
I think your assumptions have some glaring fallacies.
Remainder of rude and silly nitpick deleted. Go away and don’t come back – JQ
BenK 01.18.24 at 12:39 am
Worst case scenario: policies will encourage the aspects of childbirth and rearing that are easily measured… and only those. Good luck with the resulting population.
Casey Ydenberg 01.18.24 at 1:07 am
I did some recent data-vis work on how population structures will change by 2100. The results were … unsettling.
John Q 01.18.24 at 3:27 am
Casey @5 You haven’t spelt out what you mean by “dependency rate”, but the standard definition used by statistical agencies defines working age as 15-64, which is obsolete at both ends. I’d suggest redoing the analysis with 20-70, which is closer to current reality both for workforce entry and for retirement age.
John Q 01.18.24 at 3:32 am
Kent @1 Sure, with different policies, choices might change. But as a general rule, the more conditions have improved, the lower the birth rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
So, if you are hoping for changes that will increase fertility you need to look at specific measures like free childcare. There’s a good case for such measures, but they will involve a lot more labour requirements than aged care
Dr. Hilarius 01.18.24 at 4:26 am
I have been in many, many nursing homes, assisted living/rehabilitation facilities and “memory care” units in Washington State. A common feature is that the non-professional staff (CNAs, cleaning staff, attendants) are overwhelmingly immigrants, many from Africa. These facilities could not operate without immigrant employees and understaffing remains a problem.
Pay is low, the work can be physically demanding and it requires contact with bodily waste and illness. Expand the native-born population as you like, I doubt that the pool of native born care givers for the aged would substantially increase.
Alex SL 01.18.24 at 5:15 am
kent,
Your comment @1 is more or less what I was writing about in mine @2.
In what sense would it be “defeatism” to think that global population will peak instead of a forlorn hope turning to a breath of relief when it actually happens, because we have maybe avoided civilisational collapse if it happens soon enough?
If you hope that global population will never peak, that means it will ultimately grow to infinity. Those are mathematically the only two options: continue growing forever or stop growing at some point. So, if you consider peaking, i.e., stop growing, to be “defeat”, how will feeding, clothing, housing (and holidaying and buying electronic gadgets and plastic garbage for Christmas etc) infinity people work in practice?
I really do not understand how human population not peaking is supposed to work out and would appreciate suggestions. All I can come up with is the technological singularity taking care of everything, but that’s just the rapture in new clothes.
Max 01.18.24 at 7:58 am
Jon,
this doesn’t strike me as a terribly convincing discussion of the problems of worker shortages in aging societies. Instead of waving away “won’t somebody think of the old people” as a figleaf of Musk type-“pro-natalism”, why not engage in a serious policy debate? Yes, the state should not intervene in people’s choice to get kids, but what kind of incentives would you support or are you as fatalistic as Kent seems to assert?
“If you find this scary, you might want to consider that children aged 0-5 require more care than old people, and for a much longer time. Because this care is provided within the family, and without any monetary return, it doesn’t appear in national accounts. But a pro-natalist policy requires that people have more children than they choose to at present. To the extent that this is achieved by subsidising the associated labour costs (for example, through publicly funded childcare), it will rapidly offset the eventual benefit in having more workers available to provide aged care.”
Are you arguing that publicly funded childcare does not have positive labour market impacts because it requirs too much labour input ? Could you elaborate on that with actual data?
Adam Kotsko 01.18.24 at 12:06 pm
There is something obscene about the idea that the government needs to insert itself into people’s most intimate and life-shaping decisions, all so there will be more workers available to care for strangers at the old folks’ home.
Mike Huben 01.18.24 at 1:19 pm
Adam Kotsko @ 11:
“government needs to insert itself into people’s most intimate and life-shaping decisions”: now there’s some loaded terminology.
Making it affordable to have more children EXPANDS choices, it doesn’t make them for parents. Reliance on markets can easily be argued to reduce parent’s choices when they cannot afford more children.
reason 01.18.24 at 1:40 pm
Max,
I always want to people making comments like yours – “which is the more serious problem – that there are people who want jobs who can’t find them, or there are people jobs where it is hard to find workers at the going wage?”
Worker shortages are a good thing. We can finally do something about stalling productivity and inequality.
Trader Joe 01.18.24 at 4:42 pm
Isn’t the issue regarding older people less about providing them care and more about the associated cost of medical care and providing the old age facilities in the first place.
In a declining population base, presumably GDP would be at best flat if not also declining – which would mean that as the age of the population skews higher the percentage of GDP being devoted to healthcare (and social welfare) would likely be rising.
I agree with your arguments that you could easily get the workers – but caring for dying people isn’t really a high productivity use of GDP….that has to have knock on consequences as to availability of resources for other uses (i.e. defense, social welfare etc.).
Seekonk 01.18.24 at 4:52 pm
If a society believes that it is skewing too old, it could encourage immigration by people younger than, say, 25 or 30.
Doug Muir 01.18.24 at 5:41 pm
“a pro-natalist policy requires that people have more children than they choose to at present.”
Most people in the developed world have fewer children than they say they want.
In the particular case of Australia, women say that they want around 2.2 children. They’re actually having, on average, 1.6 children. So there’s a quite significant gap between what they want and what they’re actually doing.
You can view this two ways: as a revealed preference (they say they want X, but they really want Y, because that’s what they’re actually doing) or as preference suppression (they really want X, but are settling for Y because X is too expensive / difficult). However, this gap between expressed preference and actual number of children is astonishingly widespread — in the developed world, it’s nearly universal. As a broad generalization, women in the developed world consistently say they want between half a child and a full child more than they’re actually having. So, that makes preference suppression seem a much more likely explanation.
This in turn suggests that well crafted pro-natalist policies would allow people to make their preferred choices, viz., on average have more kids.
Doug M.
nastywoman 01.18.24 at 6:04 pm
and there is this news that:
‘Germany, Once a Powerhouse, Is at an Economic ‘Standstill’
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › World › Europe
13 hours ago — The economy shrank last year and is not predicted to grow much in 2024. Farmers are angry, industrial output is falling and the government …’
and nowhere in this article is the news that it is nearly impossible for German companies wanting to produce more (and thusly to grow the economy) to get the needed workers.
And I just don’t know if all these Fans of (unlimited?) GROWTH are aware that:
‘The population of Germany is expected to decline from 83.8 million people in 2020 to to 74.7 million in 2100.
And how in this world would a country
THEN
NOT ‘shrink”?
As some ‘Mr. Tordoir’ said: “The Germans need to think about what kind of economy they want,” Mr. Tordoir said. “But once they make the jump to deregulate and let go of fiscal straitjackets, there is a lot of potential in the German economy. It’s just not being used.”
Was that a… joke?
John Q 01.18.24 at 11:13 pm
Doug M @16 I plan to write about this point in a later post. There is indeed room for policies that remove some of the barriers to having children, and these would be beneficial. Better treatments for medical infertility and institutions that promoted more stable relationships would help. But I don’t think they will close the gap you describe. More on this soon, I hope.
John Q 01.18.24 at 11:15 pm
Seekonk I plan to write about migration later. But it isn’t a solution for the problem of globally declining fertility (if it is indeed a problem).
clew 01.19.24 at 1:03 am
If you hope that global population will never peak, that means it will ultimately grow to infinity. Those are mathematically the only two options: continue growing forever or stop growing at some point.
We could asymptotically approach a maximum without ever quite reaching it, always growing but more and more slowly. “The S-curve” turns up reasonably often in reality.
This does not seem to make economics-minded people any happier.
Scott P. 01.19.24 at 1:48 am
And how in this world would a country
THEN
NOT ‘shrink”?
That’s an easy question to answer. Labor productivity in Germany increased by a factor of 2.75 in the 40 years between 1970 and 2010. If it increases a similar amount in the 80 years between 2020 and 2100, then a 10% decline in population as you suggest will still leave the economy nearly 2.5 times as big in 2100 as it is today.
William S. Berry 01.19.24 at 1:50 am
No matter what we do (even allowing for one’s apocalypse of choice), birth rates will continue to decline and human populations will continue to age (I’m sure I don’t need to point out that longevity increase doesn’t figure into this. It’s not relevant in terms of the scale of the statistics we’re dealing with here). It matters what one thinks of that fact only to the extent that intelligent policy is affected, one way or another.
What John Q said, in other words. As per usual.
David in Tokyo 01.19.24 at 6:58 am
Hmm. The point that children 0 to 5 require more care than the elderly in their last (average) year is well taken, but this extends through high school*, college, and even graduate school as well. (Some graduate school is “productive” in the sense that it’s funded by folks who want that research to be done. (In my case, Xerox, Sumitomo, and ARPA.))
But what all this means is that a declining population is completely non-problematic. As I’ve said before, all you need to do is tax the rich. Caring for the elderly is actually a fine job/carreer, as long as it’s in the context of adequately funded/equipped facilities and decent salaries. Sure, in real life as it exists now, it’s horrific abuse of immigrants. But it doesn’t have to be. And taxing the rich to pay decent salaries to teachers, elderly carers and the like boosts the economy overall. It’s not a zero sum game: money paid to nurses and teachers gets spent in the local economy.
In real life, the elderly can be really cheap to maintain right up to the last year of their lives. Here, we’re turning 72 this year, and while I was worried moving into retirement that we’d be running our savings down too fast, we’re not. (Even though our total retirement income between us is on the order of fully vested US Social Security.)
Sure, we’re sitting pretty: no car, no kids, no loans, owned home, no expensive hobbies**. Real estate taxes are a worry (but not a problem so far) but many localities will accept owner-resident real estate itself in lieu of taxes thereon when the owner passes away or leaves.
*: Obligatory Japan-specific content: Although Japan’s population is crashing since it’s child-bearing age women largely aren’t, and there are fewer and fewer children, the Japanese working class has realized that teaching in primary and secondary education is a hideously bad gig (low pay, high-stress work with horrendous amounts of unpaid overtime), and despite the reducing need, Japan is desperately short of teachers. Sheesh.
***: I recently grabbed a 500CM + 50/4.0 Distagon CF for cheap (Yay!), but film prices have gone through the roof. Sheesh.
https://pbase.com/davidjl/image/174280603
Suzanne 01.19.24 at 9:47 am
@8:
We may never know, because in the United States government support for the elderly and the people (family and professional) who care for them has never been commensurate with the work involved and the extent of the need. I have been in nursing homes on the opposite coast and there were a number of workers who were white and native English speakers. These will never be anybody’s dream jobs but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be made to be more attractive job prospects.
Tm 01.19.24 at 2:46 pm
17: „‘The population of Germany is expected to decline from 83.8 million people in 2020 to to 74.7 million in 2100.“
At some point, sure, population will shrink. But an interesting and little known fact about Germany is that its population has been near constant, at 80 million +- a few, for more than 50 years. Neither growth nor shrinkage. Curious how that is even possible when the conventional wisdom says without growth you are doomed. It has also been predicted many times that Germans are going extinct any time soon. For better or worse, hasn’t happened.
Bill R 01.19.24 at 3:46 pm
Obligatory Sci-Fi comment about an infinite population in an infinite universe
engels 01.19.24 at 8:11 pm
[Geriatric care]… will never be anybody’s dream jobs
How many people would view banking or accountancy as dream jobs if they weren’t so well paid and prestigious? Someone more cynical than myself could also ask this question about professional research in certain academic fields…
Salem 01.20.24 at 1:35 am
Regarding the pseudo-Malthusian comments above, it’s not enough to say the Earth’s carrying capacity isn’t infinite. Some numbers are so large that they can be effectively treated as infinity. If the human population on Earth can keep on happily growing for (say) another billion years before hitting any supposed Limits To Growth, then it’s nothing to worry about.
It would require an argument that the carrying capacity of earth will become a meaningful constraint in the foreseeable future, which is hard to imagine. Far easier to imagine a world where population decline causes technological stagnation or even regression.
If we allowed developers to build unhindered, that would do far more to make family formation affordable, and hence solve the population crisis, than any subsidy.
nastywoman 01.20.24 at 5:27 am
@ ‘It has also been predicted many times that Germans are going extinct any time soon’.
OR
better said:
‘Überfremdet’
As it is nothing else than the old Racist Nazi prediction – that the (‘pure’) population gets ‘overwhelmed’ by ‘hordes’ of ‘Fureigners’.
(who ‘produce Babies like rabbits’)
And as it was kind of reborn in the US as the ‘replacement theory’ and somehow the Brexit had a lot to do with it too – it has become ‘THE winning argument’ for all Right Wing Racist Parties and the German AFD even came out with a map in order to show how ‘katastrophal überfremdet’ Germany already is (mainly in the West)
And how ironic that the pro-natalist movements of all these Right-Wing Racist movements just want more ‘national babies’ instead of ‘fureign ones’.
nastywoman 01.20.24 at 5:43 am
while actually the population of ‘The Homeland of the Muslims’ is getting ‘replaced’ –
as
‘Im Jahr 2020 waren die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate das Land mit dem höchsten Anteil an Einwanderern an der Gesamtbevölkerung: 88 Prozent der Einwohner waren in diesem Jahr Migranten’.
engels 01.20.24 at 11:23 am
The final paragraph seems to assume that without state intervention (“policies”) there is a set of natural, “voluntary” choices people make that should be respected (that will lead to below replacement rate). That seems like a market libertarian argument to me. Women’s and men’s choices about reproduction made against a background of markets, inequality and competitive and stratified careers aren’t in any way natural. And it’s really hard to imagine a modern state that doesn’t do anything to make it more or less attractive to have kids.
engels 01.20.24 at 12:49 pm
Also not sure where and why to draw the line between the handouts parents currently get (some free education and childcare, tax credits, etc) and distortionary, pro-natalist tilting of the scales.
Tm 01.20.24 at 3:45 pm
Salem 27: „If the human population on Earth can keep on happily growing for (say) another billion years before hitting any supposed Limits To Growth, then it’s nothing to worry about.“
Fascinating stuff. World population currently grows about.8% per year. Let’s take for arithmetic simplicity .7%. That implies a doubling time of 100 years. After a thousand years, population would have multiplied by 1000, after 2000 years it would be… let’s calculate… a factor of 1000’000. There would be 8 billion billion people after 3000 years. I leave it as an exercise how long until there’d be more people than atoms (about 10 to the 50) in the world. It’d be a lot less than a billion or even a million years.
I’m curious if any of the pro-natalists is willing to answer these questions:
1 What do you consider a desirable rate of population growth?
2 For how long do you think it can be sustained?
3 How many people would there be on this planet after that time?
4 Where would they all live and what would they eat?
Anybody?
William Berry 01.20.24 at 6:47 pm
@Salem and engels:
If you cut a “liberal” and a “marxist” deep enough, does it bleed cultural conservatism?*
*Come to think of it, you only need to scratch the skin a bit.
nastywoman 01.20.24 at 9:32 pm
or should we just have quoted the most important point for this discussion:
‘There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations. The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country’.
nastywoman 01.20.24 at 10:39 pm
BUT
I had to smile about:
‘Women’s and men’s choices about reproduction made against a background of markets, inequality and competitive and stratified careers aren’t in any way natural’.
As a true ‘Marxist’ (my German grandmother) once asked:
Why are all these poor people make all these Babies they can’t afford?
MisterMr 01.21.24 at 1:03 am
As Nastywoman says, the relationship between income and natality seems to be inverse.
I read somewhere that this was true for most recorded history too.
I don’t know why this happens, it is quite counterintuitive. In modern society it is women’s education, but why did this happen earlier?
J-D 01.21.24 at 7:16 am
The main pro-natalist policy favoured by pro-natalist politicians is exhortation: talking about how it’s important for people to have more children. This policy is associated with practically no benefit, but also little cost.
Salem 01.21.24 at 9:26 am
@Tm:
This is exactly my point. If the carrying capacity of earth is unimaginably, mind-bogglingly vast, then saying “but not infinite!” is irrelevant. Anyone who wants to claim that the Earth can only support so many people as a reason to limit population needs to make a specific argument as to roughly what that number is.
I’m not claiming the population of earth can grow for another billion years. Maybe it can, maybe it can’t. That was simply an example of an unimaginably vast population, and an unimaginably vast timeframe, such that technological and social progress will have “upset the applecart” many times over, making current concerns irrelevant. I have no idea what the carrying capacity is. I’m not the one seeking to limit the world’s population, so it’s enough for me to note that we aren’t anywhere near it.
notGoodenough 01.21.24 at 12:00 pm
[Sorry for the double post – I messed up the html tags on my previous comment, so please delete/ignore that if possible for clarity]
@ Salem
Respectfully, I find your comments:
and
a bit odd, given that the carrying capacity frequently refers to “the number of us, living in a given manner, which a given environment can support indefinitely’ (alternatives use “without environmental degradation” or similar terms, essentially implying that sustainability is foundational to the concept).
Currently, the global population is highly reliant on fossil fuel use [1], and even ignoring attendant issues larger populations entail [2] this is not sustainable. Thus, it seems far from clear to me that we are, in fact, currently not anywhere near the carrying capacity of earth [3].
Unless you intended to argue that the earth can carry much larger numbers of people in the same way I might travel at more than 120 mph by diving out of an aeroplane without a parachute…? But I am given to understand that is not typically the way carrying capacity is used.
Footnotes:
[1] Such as resulting climate change rendering large portions of the earth uninhabitable, increasing global unrest, ramping up the spread of diseases and invasive species, wrecking the biosphere we are dependent on, etc.
[2] Such as requiring ever improving healthcare, ever more delicate supply chains, monoculture making ecosystems more fragile, etc.
[3] I should be clear that I do not assert that a theoretical world which has developed sustainable energy, distributes resources fairly, etc., would not be able to offer such a carrying capacity – as that would be outside my area, I would not presume to comment. But given that we do not appear to be living in that world, I don’t see it as relevant to this discussion.
Alex SL 01.21.24 at 1:03 pm
In case my comment that isn’t appearing despite being ‘duplicate’ when I try to resubmit was rejected for being too long:
It is incorrect that we “aren’t anywhere near” the carrying capacity, we have already overshot it – if we want to maintain our current living standards. The current population can perhaps be sustainably maintained, perhaps even doubled, at the cost of most biodiversity, if and only if we all collectively agree to have living standards that frankly very few people would accept (no airplanes, no cars, no meat, no family homes with nice gardens, etc.). Thus that is not a politically viable option. But if we do want to maintain current living standards and allow many currently poor people to aspire to first world middle-class standards, we are already at least twice over the limit in terms of sustainable population size.
(The problem is that it isn’t easy to speak of a simple carrying capacity. It is a function of what living standards and thus resource consumption we assume, how much space we want to leave for lifeforms other than humans, wheat, rice, and beans, and what level of sustainability we want. And on top of that the most limiting of all required resources is the limiting one: if at a given moment there is arable soil for twenty billion but freshwater for only fifteen, then fifteen it is at that moment.)
MisterMr 01.21.24 at 2:43 pm
@Salem 39
Since we are apparently heading towards ecologic catastrophe, it seems we already passed Earth’s long term carrying capacity, no?
Salem 01.21.24 at 11:57 pm
We may well be heading towards ecologic catastrophe, but the causes of our environmental problems lie in sociology, not physics (e.g. political resistance to clean energy). Now, that doesn’t make those problems any less real – and frankly I am not optimistic that we will solve them. But the fact that we are capable (IMO likely) to do terrible things without ever approaching the maximum number of people the planet can support, simply demonstrates even more clearly that said maximum number is an irrelevance.
That said, I admire Alex SL’s moral clarity. If you are horrified at technological innovation for religious reasons, then I can see why your hairshirt environmentalism would benefit from fewer people. The moral entrepreneurs here have hit on a solid idea. Block new technology -> lower tech level -> poorer population -> fewer, older people -> greater resistance to change -> block new technology.
I can’t say I subscribe to this religion. My own hope is that our history as a technological species will not be stymied, that innovation will be allowed to unlock more energy, food, etc, allowing more people to thrive on the planet, in turn deepening innovation and technology, on and upwards indefinitely. And this virtuous cycle benefits the planet too – e.g. mankind steadily reshaped England from primitive forests and fens into a green and pleasant land of rolling fields. Hopefully one day, perhaps in the far future, technology will advance so far that we can do the same for the Sahara and the Amazon.
nastywoman 01.22.24 at 12:09 am
@
‘In modern society it is women’s education, but why did this happen earlier?’
As we all? know –
Children were/are
‘The Riches of the Poor’.
‘Roughly 160 million children were subjected to child labour at the beginning of 2020, This accounts for nearly 1 in 10 children worldwide. Almost half of them are in hazardous work that directly endangers their health and development.
Children may be driven into work for various reasons. Most often, child labour occurs when families face financial challenges or uncertainty – whether due to poverty, sudden illness of a caregiver, or job loss of a primary wage earner’.
Alex SL 01.22.24 at 4:38 am
Salem,
You seem to be making quite the assumptions here, as I am an atheist, and I am not at all horrified by technological innovation. I am horrified by the loss of biological diversity that our descendants will only be able to read about in old books, by the loss of natural habitat, by the destruction of fertile soils through salinisation, over-fertilisation, and erosion, and by anticipation of the human suffering that is inevitable once we have a few years of not enough food to go around at a global scale. Or was this an attempt to dismiss another opinion as superstitious instead of a misunderstanding? I do not want to make too many assumptions based on a short comment myself, so I am unsure.
And while I would prefer to remain polite, I can unfortunately only describe the remainder of your comment as untethered from observable reality grading into unhinged.
You implicitly argue that because we haven’t hit max pop yet, we never will. Do you also continue driving full tilt towards a wall with the argument that you haven’t hit it yet? Infinite population only works with magic. The moment you acknowledge physical reality, in that food, water, clothes, housing, transport have to come from somewhere, we are only haggling about the exact value of the maximum. Historically, humans have experienced famines quite regularly, whenever population had grown to a level that couldn’t be fed with three bad harvests in a row. There is no reason that the same couldn’t happen at a continental or even global scale, especially with increasing effects of global heating.
You argue that more old people would mean more green ‘hair-shirt’ policies; that is immediately disproved by looking around the world as it is right now. Old people tend to vote conservative, which means pro-business policies and deregulation. Just about the only connection I can see is NIMBYist opposition to affordable housing developments, but that is a far cry from pensioners voting in politicians who will stop the Amazon from being turned into soy farms or who arrest technological research.
You hope that technological progress can continue “indefinitely”. This again is magical thinking. Reality contains things like diminishing returns, physical limits, resource limits, and efficiencies maxing out at 100% because that is what efficiency means. As amazing as smartphones are, then don’t increase corn harvests tenfold. It seems that it isn’t me, the one who has a worldview informed by physics, biology, history, and macroeconomics, who approaches the issue from a religious perspective.
Finally, you celebrate “primitive forests” being turned into agricultural fields. If that is your aesthetic preference, that is that, because that isn’t empirically arguable like sustainable population sizes. I like marzipan, she likes chocolate. I prefer a world with millions of species of conifers, ferns, orchids, daisies, fish, squirrels, spiders, ants, and planarians, you prefer one with fifty species of crop plants. But we have to have the moral clarity of understanding that this is what your vision of turning the Amazon into rolling fields means: an ecological catastrophe that makes the Permian mass extinction, in which 95% of all species of the time perished and that the planet needed ten million years to recover from, look like a picnic.
As for the Sahara, vegetation history is not my field, but to my understanding there appears to be some evidence that the present desertification was caused by human land use through over-grazing (DOI 10.3389/feart.2017.00004). This would mean that it was technological progress that turned it unproductive and borderline inhabitable.
tm 01.22.24 at 7:40 am
I didn’t expect Salem to rise to my challenge at 33 and come up with some sort of actual argument, including numbers, after I showed the absurdity and ignorance of his reasoning. Otoh I didn’t expect him either to respond by saying “This is exactly my point” after I showed the absurdity and ignorance of his reasoning. As I said, this level of innumerate delusion is fascinating but keep in mind that many people with economic and political powerful think exactly like that.
tm 01.22.24 at 8:22 am
“people with economic and political power”. Sorry.
Salem 01.22.24 at 11:01 am
No, I didn’t say that. As I have repeatedly pointed out, if you’re driving “full tilt towards a wall,” it matters how far away the wall is. If it’s 100 yards, slam on the brakes. If it’s 3000 miles, it’s absurd to worry. You are pretty much always driving towards a wall at some distance. It seems likely that in several billion years, the Sun will consume the earth. I’m not going to make any changes to my lifestyle today based on that knowledge.
We don’t have an aesthetic disagreement, we have a moral and intellectual one. Morally, you think your aesthetic attachment to conifers and ferns justifies you denying life to billions, and intellectually, you use some reheated Malthusianism to tell yourself you’re the good guy. And of course you are religious, because people have been making exactly your arguments for centuries – in fact, every word of your little rant could be taken from a Paul Ehrlich book – and the repeated laughable failures of these arguments, and tragic real-world results, don’t trouble you in the slightest.
Alex SL 01.22.24 at 1:13 pm
Salem,
Read your first paragraph, and then your second. You are arguing that there will never be a wall because we haven’t hit it yet. You seem to expect that the only correct time for an Ehrlich to appear is three years before civilisational collapse, because if he warns a few decades too early, you can conclude he was the boy who cried wolf. The analogy doesn’t work, however, because infinite growth is a trend instead of a one-off, binary event; it would work better if the boy was desperately trying to convince the villagers to let him guard the sheep, who didn’t let him because they think wolves don’t exist, because they haven’t come yet.
That, and shifting the balance of evidence onto those who argue that the planet cannot feed infinity people and that we are already past the point of sustainability, is all you have. Have you never opened a newspaper? Have you formulated your position without ever consulting expert opinion on resource limits? You could just as well ask somebody in the same tone to prove that humans are mortal because you haven’t died yet or to prove that you can’t walk through walls because you haven’t tried lately. You aren’t trying to make projections about the future based on physical reality as it demonstrably is, you simply assume that because things are okay now, they will be okay forever.
Regarding morals, yes, I do believe that we have a moral duty both to other lifeforms on this planet and to future generations of humans by preserving biodiversity instead of leaving them a wasteland. You say that I am denying life to billions, but I do no such thing, because they exist entirely inside your imagination. What I do is reject the idea that we have a duty to maximise one hypothetical number without taking into account any other parameters like their quality of life or the time axis. Future human generations of some size will likely exist, and if we make generation N too large, generation N+5 and N+10 will have to be much smaller than they could have been. That is what not living sustainably means: it means you egoistically consume the basis of living that you should have left intact for your descendants.
I’m out.
William Berry 01.22.24 at 4:49 pm
@Alex SL:
Thnx for taking the trouble to write your last comment. I utterly lack the kind of patience required to deal with that kind of garbage.
I thought I remembered “Salem” making some thoughtful comments in the past. Maybe not; I might have been dreaming. In any case, I’m a little surprised to see Silicon Valley Tech Douchebro arguments here on CT, where (mostly!) smart people come to post and comment.
What “Salem” is spewing here is just warmed-over Longtermism, and everyone here knows what repulsive crap that is, along with its idiotic enabling ideology of “Effective Altruism” (think here of the implication that ordinary altruism isn’t effective and you’ll get a good sense of the quality of intellect we’re dealing with here).
Like Alex, I’m out! There is nothing that Salem could add to their “arguments” that ought to interest anyone.
engels 01.22.24 at 7:58 pm
Funny that the response to a commenter named “Salem” should be a chorus of “burn the witch” (full disclosure: I have not read Salem’s comments…)
J-D 01.22.24 at 9:58 pm
It is not possible to deny life to James Bond for the same reason that it is not possible to deny James Bond a martini, or a knighthood, or entrance to a building, or a supply of ammunition, or anything else: because there is no James Bond. It is possible (at least in some cases) to deny something to people who exist; it is never possible to deny something (no matter what it is) to people who do not exist.
What makes you think it’s warmed-over?
Salem 01.22.24 at 11:15 pm
I must admit, it’s a nice touch to call me a “long-termist” for saying we shouldn’t worry too much about the far future, while you condemn billions to stagnation in the here and now for fear of a hypothetical maximum population we could only hit in the far future.
This conversation would be funny if it weren’t so serious. “Resource Limits” – as though resources aren’t a function of technology! Worrying about overpopulation – when the earth’s population is almost certain to fall! Saying that the huge damage your ideas have inflicted and continue to inflict – forcible sterilisations in India, One Child Policy in China, family formation prevented by unaffordable housing in the West – isn’t real, because all the children whose births you have prevented existed only in the hopes and dreams of their parents – hopes and dreams you rejoice in dashing, the better to protect the occasional flatworm!
May you be treated as you treat others.
William S. Berry 01.23.24 at 2:23 am
Maybe it isn’t? Maybe it comes straight from the horse’s mouth, and is so fresh it reeks. I don’t know.
I mostly just think it’s just one of those idioms like “half-baked” that don’t mean much but as stock phrases facilitate fast writing, which is the only kind of writing I care about doing. What’s more, most people don’t give them a second thought. You’re an exception.
I hope that one day you will find that perfect purity and clarity of expression you so urgently seek. I’ve never found it anywhere; and I don’t remember seeing it in anything I have ever read, although that doesn’t prove it doesn’t exist. You might share some examples from your own work.
And in the meantime we just keep rhetoricking along!
John Q 01.23.24 at 4:06 am
I think it’s time to call a halt to this one. I have no idea who is saying what to whom at this point. So, unless someone has a new comment (that is, a response to the OP and not to previous comments), I won’t approve any more.
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