There are almost 7.7 billion people on the planet already, even with less than replacement birthrates, I think we're good on human count for the next 300 years or so at a minimum so unless the birth rate really catastrophically collapses. We could lose an order of magnitude of people without endangering genetic diversity, take significant load off of the environment, and frankly, quite probably improve the human condition with fewer billions of other people to compete with in the world. I recommend seeing how we can extend this trend to demographics and countries it hasn't reached yet.
The math is more dismal than that. With a 1.5 birth rate (common in Europe) the population drops by more than half in three generations (about 100 years). This causes the economy to collapse—stock valuations have baked in assumptions of future generations of consumers existing. But it can get worse. South Korea has a fertility rate below 1 and Taiwan is headed that way. At that rate, the population drops by almost 90% within a century.
Poorly constructed economies predicated on ever increasing growth have no business existing. Economies will adapt (and should! it just means more economic drag to provide for seniors until the larger, older cohort has aged out and equilibrium at a lower population level has been reached).
It's disturbing to me that people think population must keep growing. If anything the world could stand to LOSE a significant portion of the population. Resources would be far less strained.
If we built our economies on the expectation of continued population growth, then that just means there was a MASSIVE lack of forethought. But that doesn't mean the solution is to start pumping out more kids. Instead we adapt how these structures work to accommodate the flat or lessened population numbers.
This policy is called degrowth (or ecofascism) and it's not true. Resources were used far more inefficiently and many of them were used more in absolute terms when the population was smaller. It's even possible that we need this many people to do the scientific research needed to use things more efficiently.
Specially when it's clearly not true. Just look at population not in work in western countries, even outside the current pandemic situation. If we really needed more people wouldn't we have near full employment? Economy will adapt to less demand, though there will be likely pains, but money is just numbers anyway...
It doesn't rely on ever expanding populations. It relies on retirees to be the minority which is a reasonable assumption to make. After all, everything the elderly buy has to be extracted/made via labor of the young.
It's a form of laziness, the most common of human behaviors. Deny, avoid, delay, until you're absolutely forced to do what is uncomfortable or painful.
> Every day I see attractive, intelligent, productive, highly empathetic couples justifying their decision to not have children ... The total fertility rate for North America is 1.7 [1]. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate for Sub-Saharan Africa is 4.7 [2].
HN requires I give the best interpretation here. It sounds like there's an observation bias: you see prime individuals not reproducing, but what about elsewhere? It certainly seems possible the same cohort in Saharan Africa are not making the same choice, given the higher birth rate.
> ...IQ is 50-70% heritable.
Alright, but IQ doesn't translate to attractiveness or productivity. My school's valedictorian went on to work an IT Support job. Should we be saddened if they don't reproduce?
Lastly, there are plenty of poor, intelligent people. Your comment sets up this narrative that intelligence is split by continent, and humanity will be worse off, since the smart continent has a lower reproductive rate. The facts don't support that. Most people alive today are the progeny of serfs of the Middle Ages. They were poor, but certainly not all were unintelligent.
Most childless couples I know feel it's unethical to have children with impending environmental collapse. Why would you want to bring children into the world with global warming, mass climate migration and other horrific things likely to happen within their lifetimes?
> Why would you want to bring children into the world with global warming, mass climate migration and other horrific things likely to happen within their lifetimes?
Because not bringing them in is defeatism. Suicide in fact.
If you want to solve the problem, children are ones who can do it, and your task is to prepare them to do it.
If you flunk from this, you are the reason the world fails.
> If you want to solve the problem, children are ones who can do it
Yeah, but maybe not human children.
If anything we need more non human children on this planet, we are attempting to fish the oceans dry, there's less than 10% of old growth forests still in North America.
Almost every ecosystem on earth is severely degraded due to human activity. If aliens came to visit they might logically assume that humans are at war with nature.
We are living in a slow moving apocalypse and we don't even recognise that fact because we think that this is normal.
What baffles me since I first studied ecology in 1990-s and to this day is this inexplicable divide in certain someones' minds between "us" and "earth".
There is no such thing. We are the one, the unity.
There is no border, no difference between "ecosystems" and "us". The whole biosphere is a single, very complex, but undivisable system. Get rid of any tiny single part, like a single human being and it responds.
In this light, I see the notions like childfree or extinction rebellion as cancer. People doing this do not even attempt to understand the real consequences of their actions.
You may want to expand your circle if that’s “most” of the childless couples you know.
And why would you want to bring children into the world? Because there is no guarantee those things will happen.
What if someone decided not to have children in the 1960’s because the Cold War was going to result in nuclear annihilation? They and their non-existent children missed out on decades of peace and prosperity.
>IQ
That's not relevant. There are no controls for black IQ because they almost uniformally exist at a socioeconomic strata beneath the average white. The concentration of the majority of the African-descended US population is in economically depressed areas. The culture is heavily controlled by white influence, and while it's not necessarily intended to undermine their image it certainly doesn't help it. Lil Wayne is not a good role model, Lil Wayne is not good PR he is a poor emissary to represent the majority of the black population. So what do we have as a product? We've got a population that is at a disproportionate disadvantage because their image has been smeared, because they grew up in the wrong cities, and they had bad role models elected for them. And there's people who break the mold despite that.
And since you can't grow a baby in a vacuum, the data is inexorably tainted. Not to mention that it decorrelates once you move out of the range of people with serious cognitive deficits, at least in terms of monetary success, with outliers showing 140IQ and $30k income per annum. And in terms of productivity there's too many arguments to be made to even begin considering how lackluster that argument is. Like productivity being tied to income, and that income isn't correlated with IQ, thus IQ can't be determined to have a correlation with productivity, right?
>liberal free-market utopia
We're a psuedo-fascist democracy. Since the first time the government elected to choose a company to even acknowledge we departed from the liberal ideal. Corporations being people? Big fascist move there. But yeah, you keep laboring under that impression.
>growth, innovation, future-oriented
Maybe we've figured out, collectively, that shit is fucked. That the finite world can't provide each generation consecutively with the same allotment of resources and the tangible decline in quality of life that we're already suffering is enough to push most everyone out of the reproduction cycle, voluntarily or not. Maybe people are (literally) sick from the constant goading we receive from our "culture" which is little more than emotionally appealing marketing in the vast majority of cases. It's a dissatisfying and vacuous sphere of garbage.
To the point of innovation, we're hilariously stagnant in every aspect. Always have been.
Future orientation is what allowed the communist revolution to justify the killing of millions. Future orientation is what the Nazi party used to justify their actions. We need to look to the now.
> I know the utopian liberal vision is "we're all created equal," but it simply is not true with the scientific consensus being that IQ is 50-70% heritable [3].
"heritable" does not mean "genetic", please stop reading fake science and slatestarcodex comments. Children exist in the same environment and have the same nutrition as their parents.
Besides that, most published scientific results are false, so why are you believing anything about IQ when you haven't personally sat the people you're claiming are inferior down and had them take a test?
If you meant unborn children or fetuses you should've said that, because the most obvious interpretation of your original words is that you meant postnatal children. That is typically how the word "Child" is defined: "A person between birth and puberty"[1] - not a person before birth.
Nevertheless, what you cited and attacked is uncontroversial. IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination. You then turned such a scientifically uncontroversial statement into an emotional straw-man attack.
All children start off as fetuses and inherit things that affected them before they were children.
> IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination.
Yes, and I said it wasn't genetic. A "heritable" effect can only last one generation - all you have to do is invest in lead abatement.
In fact, even if it is genetic it can still be treated. Phenylketonurics have a "genetic condition that reduces intelligence" that affects them when they drink Coke, and the treatment is to not do that.
People who discuss this in SSC and marginalrevolution comments don't care about this - what they want is to have secret knowledge that society won't acknowledge that says they're morally superior to Mexicans so they can complain about immigration.
> All children start off as fetuses and inherit things
Right, but you said "Children exist in the same environment", which is present-tense. If you said "Children existed in the same environment", then it would've come across as you intended.
> I said it wasn't genetic
Source/rationale? That's a rather strong claim.
> even if it is genetic it can still be treated.
Potentially correct, but it doesn't mean it can be treated well given current knowledge. There's lots of genetic problems where our treatments currently suck, and you can't claim to know when/if those treatments will get better for some specific genetic problem.
> People who discuss this in SSC and marginalrevolution comments don't care about this
Who would argue against lead abatement resulting in higher IQ levels? Who would argue that prenatal nutrition isn't part of the picture? I mean sure, you can find one nutjob in the comments section anywhere. But that's hardly an argument against anything.
Of course not, this is a strawman. I was disputing the positive claim that it isn't genetic, I was not claiming that heritability implies genetic determinism.
Irrelevant (because the assignment of twins to particular environments is mostly blinded to mutation differences) and pedantic (because the differences are trivial).
Wrong, and wrong. Keep pace with the literature. Differences can manifest as early as embryogenesis and have far reaching outcomes, e.g. there have been reports of different covid severity outcomes within a twin pair.
Hell, you do know that the cells in your own body don't all have the same genome, right?
As I said, it's irrelevant since assignment is mostly random at birth. The law of large numbers takes care of trivial differences since those differences are largely randomized.
