Demographic "doomsday" misses the mark

hn9zmdcaou

Spent a few years doing population projections for regional planning and the thing that always got lost was how sensitive the long run numbers are to small fertility and migration assumptions.

binlog

Relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/605/

bemtevi

I think we're already at a doomsday for population. The inertia of such a large world running on capitalism means we can't do anything about our problems any more, so I feel the bullet has been effectively fired. We're just watching it in slow motion.

lenerdenator

The real "doomsday" is the fact that we no longer have the population growth to sustain the increases that markets demand while simultaneously not alienating the ever-loving hell out of the labor and customers that capital depend upon for those increases. It's already leading to socio-economic and political problems.

api

I’m as skeptical of underpopulation doomerism as I was about the previous overpopulation panic. Both commit the fallacy of assuming present trends remain in place indefinitely and ignoring technology. They also both tend to be racist. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.

PowerElectronix

"The great vice of the Greeks was not sodomy, but extrapolation"

daoboy

I've got whiplash from the speed at which we've jumped from overpopulation doomsday to demographic degrowth doomsday. It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.

cubefox

The article assumes the original 1960 paper by von Foerster was a serious prediction. It wasn't. It was a joking example showing that fitting hyperbolic growth models do data leads to an absurd singularity, an infinite population in finite time. A much better write-up on it is Scott Alexander's "1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled": https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing... Scott's conclusion (written in 2019, a year before GPT-3 was published) is perhaps more interesting today than it was then: > In other words, the singularity got cancelled because we no longer have a surefire way to convert money into researchers. The old way was more money = more food = more population = more researchers. The new way is just more money = send more people to college, and screw all that. > But AI potentially offers a way to convert money into researchers. Money = build more AIs = more research. > If this were true, then once AI comes around – even if it isn’t much smarter than humans – then as long as the computational power you can invest into researching a given field increases with the amount of money you have, hyperbolic growth is back on. Faster growth rates means more money means more AIs researching new technology means even faster growth rates, and so on to infinity. > Presumably you would eventually hit some other bottleneck, but things could get very strange before that happens.

ddoolin

Sounds like we could use a psychohistory expert.

somewhereoutth

With a top heavy population pyramid, more resources have to be diverted to caring for the elderly, therefore less for raising the young - a self reinforcing mechanism. When actually given the choice, many women are choosing not to have children, for good reasons. E.g. disruption of careers, physical effects on the body, being tied to a partner, financial drain. Until we face up to both these issues, demographic collapse will continue - humanity will simply evaporate.

DemocracyFTW2

the planet will be devoid of people on Tuesday, 5 May 3108 Der letzte macht das Licht aus.

gboss

It seems to me that with natural selection, women who still choose to have children today despite having an education, employment, and all of the other factors that seem to harm the birth rate, their children will likely have as many children as they did or more, even with the same gift of modernity their parents had, and this issue will stabilize or we’ll resume population growth in 50-100 years.

samayashar

This scares me to be honest. We have an exponentially decaying graph if we compare resources on y v/s consumption on x. I don't know what the next 50 years are going to bring considering the total resources to use on Earth are an "infinite constant".

runarberg

I argue that the depopulation fears are the second coming of Malthus. And like Malthus, they will be as spectacularly wrong. Malthus’ problem was that it was easier for him to imagine the end of the world, then the end of Mercantilism. That he simply could not imagine that the large cargo ships would be used to trade in a globalized economy instead of upholding government monopoly over colonies. Similarly, today’s doomers have an easier time imagining the end of the world, then the end of capitalism. That society will rather let it self fail rather then socializing the vast wealth we have created and is currently hoarded by a handful of billionaires, and instead distribute it justly where it is needed, e.g. as retirement to our aging population or as as subsidies to shrinking school classrooms.

TacticalCoder

You have to, at least, give some credit to any dude that picks, with a straight face, Friday the 13th as the "doomsday" for anything.

fouc

John B. Calhoun made the opposite discovery in his 1958–1962 rat experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink and then replicated it with mice in 1968-1972 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-old-experimen...