Stem work is getting automated so there's not that much of a future there. But I agree cutting any sort of DEI programs that favor women would help a lot
Why do we need population growth if humans labor is on the way to become obsolete? (which has been acknowledged as inevitable in an article here).
Also I don't think that any measure that doesn't curtail female hypergamy and contraception isn't going to do much to increase fertility rates, basically all measures that would actually work require reducing freedom, which may be the reason why anyone refuses to talk about solutions to the fertility issue. We know what the cause is but the solution is unpalatable.
"As the left-wing bioconservative Pete Shanks observed, religious conservatives often understand natalism in terms of fostering traditional families and restricting abortion, while the new Silicon Valley natalists do not sacralize the early-stage embryo and often embrace reproductive technologies and even genetic enhancement."
I adamantly believe genetic enhancement is the way to the future ascent of humanity.
I think most left-wingers consider themselves 'bioconservative' by default, insofar as they're not pro-eugenics. Although they don't seem to appreciate there isn't really any long-term low-tech option for conserving your population's allele frequencies, and liberal/left policies certainly won't do it.
However, I don't think that the subtitle of this essay is always correct. We should be cautious about having too many children, and it's okay if we allow some population degrowth, since we'll have to eventually. Some of this degrowth could occur by deporting illegal aliens and other people who don't belong in the West. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation
In the very very long term... I mean, yes, we either hit 2.1-replacement non-dysgenic fertility or we get eternal war.
High-functioning populations could in principle do a lot to expand their available living space however, starting with remote work and zoning deregulations and gradually working our way up to a dyson swarm of O'Neil Cylinders. ...If you're into that sort of thing. Not everyone wants to live packed into skyscraper arcologies, though.
> I don't understand your first paragraph. War may also be a consequence of increasing the current below replacement fertility rate in developed countries
Well, human populations are either stable, declining, or expanding. If they decline, they go extinct and get removed from the equation, if they expand, you eventually hit malthusian limits, leading to war. Forever. If they're stable, it's the 2.1-RNDF scenario I described.
> The issue isn't necessary living space. It's natural resources in general
I think you're being overly pedantic. The natural resources required to sustain organic life are much less constrained than the materials needed to build O'Neil Cylinders (although, in principle, you could try to build megastructures out of organic matter with sufficiently advanced bioengineering.)
> I don't think humanity will ever have sufficient resources to construct and launch O'Neil Cylinders
You're assuming construction costs based on launching from earth, which isn't necessary at all once you have space-based industries (or even a Lofstrom loop.) And cylinders 100m in radius would be perfectly adequate as human habitats from a material standpoint.
Again, I'm not saying we necessarily *should* go this route- the kind of society that pressures us into disassembling moons for conversion into space arcologies probably won't stop when we run out of moons- but in *theory* there are many orders of magnitude of room for population expansion within the solar system.
I see what you're saying now, but that doesn't follow. A population can decline, but just because it's declining now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will decline forever. I don't believe the current world population is sustainable, and I think that increasing fertility rates higher than they are now could potentially make the eventual overpopulation even worse.
I'm not being pedantic. Living space is not the same thing as natural resources. I've spoken with other people before who think that overpopulation is all about having enough land area for everyone, so it was conceivable that you were making the same argument. In any case, the amount of living space that humans could occupy doesn't say anything about the amount freshwater, food, fossil fuels, metals, etc that are available on Earth.
Megastructures are unrealistic. You can only make a structure so big before it starts to collapse on itself due to gravity. Dwarf planets are round for a reason. Engineering cannot defy the square-cube law.
Even if you get the materials from the Moon, the cylinders will still be too expensive and unrealistic to build. I already covered this on the webpage. I doubt that humans will ever colonize space, at least for the next 100-200 years.
> I see what you're saying now, but that doesn't follow. A population can decline, but just because it's declining now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will decline forever...
If it oscillates between decline and expansion within certain fixed parameters, that's essentially long-term amortized stability for my purposes. I don't see that happening within wide parameters, though.
> ...say anything about the amount freshwater, food, fossil fuels, metals, etc that are available on Earth...
I think it's pretty safe to say that if our civilisation collapses due to lack of fossil fuels, we have much bigger problems than lack of living space, but I don't think that's likely.
> Megastructures are unrealistic. You can only make a structure so big before it starts to collapse on itself due to gravity...
I explicitly noted you don't need planet-sized (or even mile-sized) megastructures, and a dyson swarm is configured to be gravity-neutral. Have you studied this topic in any serious way?
> Even if you get the materials from the Moon, the cylinders will still be too expensive and unrealistic to build...
The asteroid belt might well be more promising, and there are plenty of other moons in the solar system, but again, what is your cost estimate based on?
Yes, civilization collapse due to global fossil fuel depletion is likely. Over 80% of humanity's current energy consumption is fossil fuels. Even if you replace what you can with nuclear, you still can't power gasoline-engine vehicles with nuclear power, so running out of oil is a *huge* concern. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/technology#modern-civilization-permanent-collapse
Yes, I have studied this topic in a serious way. Seriously dude, humanity hasn't even colonized Antarctica yet. Why the hell should we colonize Mars when we haven't even colonized the backyard yet?? If you think deeply and hard enough about that question (Why haven't we colonized Antarctica yet?), you might realize why we aren't going to colonize Mars, and why it's not worth doing so.
There are no such things as natural resources. Humans create resources through ingenuity and intelligence. Resources are practically unbounded. Julian Simon understood this. So does Robert Zubrin.
Yes, there *is* such a thing as natural resources. Natural resources are resources that are not created via human labor, like land. Humans don't create land. Humans can't create land. It is nonsensical to say that land does not exist in fixed supply. You don't know what you're talking about.
As for Zubrin, he has unrealistic aspirations for the future. Humanity will probably never colonize Mars. Human will certainly not colonize Mars for at least 150-200 years. I already explained this in the prior comment's link. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/space-colonization
You may be in denial about all this, but you will learn the truth eventually, even if it has to be done the hard way. Reality always wins. The reality is that natural resources are finite. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation
This assumes we will need extra people when robotics and AI are clearly going to replace many jobs and increase productivity. It also assumes companies don't pay taxes, often the case in modern society with multinationals but this is a modern idea. We should stop companies shipping abroad wealth through licencing and other tax avoidance schemes, they will have to up wages to the point capital investment is worth their while, then we get productivity increases. We'd also have to stop immigration so pressure is put on employers to invest.
If your only example here is a company with less than 100m gross profit, I think I can dismiss this as trivial. In any case, deducting legitimate business expenses for tax purposes is something any self-employed person can do.
If you don't realise that the gross profit is small because they've used various loopholes, like licencing their own name to themselves at extortionate cost and selling themselves coffee beans from Switzerland, both true, then I guess you're incredibly naive. "Any self-employed person" cannot do that in the UK.
This piece cites an article about Israel from More Births, which really just gestures at a solution, and ends up saying, essentially, that Israel has a high fertility culture because it is culturally pro fertility. There is no explanation of why this is the case, other than pointing to a suite of pro natalist policies that have already been adopted by lots of other countries with little or no success. For an actual explanation see https://nonzionism.com/p/why-is-israel-fertile
Definitely a feel-good puff piece eliding over the fact that moving fertility rates up is probably THE hardest problem faced by every country in the world, with literally nothing working.
Many things have been tried to practically no effect:
* $10k bonuses per child (Singapore), or for 2nd / 3rd children (Russia)
* 3 years paid parental leave (France)
* 480 days paid leave at 80% wage (Sweden)
* Income tax exemption for mothers with 4 or more kids (Hungary)
* Free state paid child care (France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia)
* Free IVF (most EU countries)
* $750 / month payments per child (South Korea)
And essentially none of these have moved the needle. Often they don’t have any positive impact at all on rates, fertility still declines, but slower. The most any fertility intervention does if they are positive is to buff rates by ~5-10% or so for 1-3 years, after which fertility rates collapse and resume the same trajectory they were on before.
Saying "hey guys, if we solve this, the hardest social problem every developed country in the world has faced unsucessfully so far, we'll be doing great!" doesn't really speak to any realistic assessment of the problem.
We may as well just shrug and say "AI will solve it," because after all if we get super-intelligent aligned AI and UBI all Americans so nobody needs to work if they don't want to, we'll be doing great, too!
Also, if unicorns existed and dispensed precious metals and fine Swiss chocolates, and everyone had a little herd of them, we'd be doing great in that future, too!
Hungary's TFR has been bumped up when you control for the number of women of fertile age remaining in the country, but I'll agree that most pro-natal incentives have had pretty modest effects. (On the cultural side, it's also highly unclear that MAXIMUM FREEEEEEDOM is supposed to be the solution here, given that family formation inherently creates obligations and bonds you can't get responsibly away from.)
At the same time, countries can't just throw their hands up and declare 'nothing is to be done' about the single most pressing problem of our age (unless we figure out some way to abolish the ageing process.)
I think Elon tweeted something about Mongolia and Georgia noticeably raising fertility rates through medals of honour and religious endorsements, so maybe some of that is replicable elsewhere? Native Swedes are around replacement at the top end of the SES spectrum as well, apparently.
Generally agree with the thrust of this article, but it’s cringe that you associate protectionism and immigration restrictions with high wages. Aporia articles often seem opposed to the mainstream consensus in economics on trade and immigration, without really providing evidence for this opposition.
It’s pretty self-evident that immigration restrictionism benefits native-born poor and working classes while mass immigration benefits those business interests who profit off cheap immigrant labor. Neoliberal economics and foreign policy are socially and economically destructive on multiple levels to ordinary people while beneficial for certain wealthy individuals and corporate interests.
There are certain conditions where immigration can long-term raise wages if and when the migrants in question start new companies or invent new goods/services, raise GDP, et cetera, but this is also something of a zero-sum game at the global level.
Hypergamy. Enhance skilled trades; encourage males into STEM; stop pushing females into evrything.
Stem work is getting automated so there's not that much of a future there. But I agree cutting any sort of DEI programs that favor women would help a lot
Why do we need population growth if humans labor is on the way to become obsolete? (which has been acknowledged as inevitable in an article here).
Also I don't think that any measure that doesn't curtail female hypergamy and contraception isn't going to do much to increase fertility rates, basically all measures that would actually work require reducing freedom, which may be the reason why anyone refuses to talk about solutions to the fertility issue. We know what the cause is but the solution is unpalatable.
We are having population growth one way or the other, it’s just a matter demographics.
Perhaps we should both increase fertility *and* curtail AI deployment?
"As the left-wing bioconservative Pete Shanks observed, religious conservatives often understand natalism in terms of fostering traditional families and restricting abortion, while the new Silicon Valley natalists do not sacralize the early-stage embryo and often embrace reproductive technologies and even genetic enhancement."
I adamantly believe genetic enhancement is the way to the future ascent of humanity.
What is a left-wing bioconservative? HBD but with UBI?
I think most left-wingers consider themselves 'bioconservative' by default, insofar as they're not pro-eugenics. Although they don't seem to appreciate there isn't really any long-term low-tech option for conserving your population's allele frequencies, and liberal/left policies certainly won't do it.
Someone opposed to reprotechnologies on egalitarian grounds.
"What is a left-wing bioconservative? HBD but with UBI?"
Ask the one I was quoting, Craig Willy, the author. I was agreeing with the genetic enhancement comment.
It is important for Westerners to have more children for economic, cultural, and genetic reasons. For now, I would support increasing Western fertility rates. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/eugenics#boosting-western-fertility Expanding IVF is also a good idea.
However, I don't think that the subtitle of this essay is always correct. We should be cautious about having too many children, and it's okay if we allow some population degrowth, since we'll have to eventually. Some of this degrowth could occur by deporting illegal aliens and other people who don't belong in the West. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation
In the very very long term... I mean, yes, we either hit 2.1-replacement non-dysgenic fertility or we get eternal war.
High-functioning populations could in principle do a lot to expand their available living space however, starting with remote work and zoning deregulations and gradually working our way up to a dyson swarm of O'Neil Cylinders. ...If you're into that sort of thing. Not everyone wants to live packed into skyscraper arcologies, though.
I don't understand your first paragraph. War may also be a consequence of increasing the current below replacement fertility rate in developed countries. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2015/09/life-is-violent.html
The issue isn't necessary living space. It's natural resources in general. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation#nowhere-close-bogus
I don't think humanity will ever have sufficient resources to construct and launch O'Neil Cylinders either. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/space-colonization
> I don't understand your first paragraph. War may also be a consequence of increasing the current below replacement fertility rate in developed countries
Well, human populations are either stable, declining, or expanding. If they decline, they go extinct and get removed from the equation, if they expand, you eventually hit malthusian limits, leading to war. Forever. If they're stable, it's the 2.1-RNDF scenario I described.
> The issue isn't necessary living space. It's natural resources in general
I think you're being overly pedantic. The natural resources required to sustain organic life are much less constrained than the materials needed to build O'Neil Cylinders (although, in principle, you could try to build megastructures out of organic matter with sufficiently advanced bioengineering.)
> I don't think humanity will ever have sufficient resources to construct and launch O'Neil Cylinders
You're assuming construction costs based on launching from earth, which isn't necessary at all once you have space-based industries (or even a Lofstrom loop.) And cylinders 100m in radius would be perfectly adequate as human habitats from a material standpoint.
Again, I'm not saying we necessarily *should* go this route- the kind of society that pressures us into disassembling moons for conversion into space arcologies probably won't stop when we run out of moons- but in *theory* there are many orders of magnitude of room for population expansion within the solar system.
I see what you're saying now, but that doesn't follow. A population can decline, but just because it's declining now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will decline forever. I don't believe the current world population is sustainable, and I think that increasing fertility rates higher than they are now could potentially make the eventual overpopulation even worse.
I'm not being pedantic. Living space is not the same thing as natural resources. I've spoken with other people before who think that overpopulation is all about having enough land area for everyone, so it was conceivable that you were making the same argument. In any case, the amount of living space that humans could occupy doesn't say anything about the amount freshwater, food, fossil fuels, metals, etc that are available on Earth.
Megastructures are unrealistic. You can only make a structure so big before it starts to collapse on itself due to gravity. Dwarf planets are round for a reason. Engineering cannot defy the square-cube law.
Even if you get the materials from the Moon, the cylinders will still be too expensive and unrealistic to build. I already covered this on the webpage. I doubt that humans will ever colonize space, at least for the next 100-200 years.
> I see what you're saying now, but that doesn't follow. A population can decline, but just because it's declining now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it will decline forever...
If it oscillates between decline and expansion within certain fixed parameters, that's essentially long-term amortized stability for my purposes. I don't see that happening within wide parameters, though.
> ...say anything about the amount freshwater, food, fossil fuels, metals, etc that are available on Earth...
I think it's pretty safe to say that if our civilisation collapses due to lack of fossil fuels, we have much bigger problems than lack of living space, but I don't think that's likely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Fuel_resources
https://web.archive.org/web/20130114062518/http://sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad11983cohen.pdf
> Megastructures are unrealistic. You can only make a structure so big before it starts to collapse on itself due to gravity...
I explicitly noted you don't need planet-sized (or even mile-sized) megastructures, and a dyson swarm is configured to be gravity-neutral. Have you studied this topic in any serious way?
> Even if you get the materials from the Moon, the cylinders will still be too expensive and unrealistic to build...
The asteroid belt might well be more promising, and there are plenty of other moons in the solar system, but again, what is your cost estimate based on?
I'm sorry, but I don't have time to respond to all this in as much depth as I'd like, but I'll send what I can.
The cost estimate is already explained on the webpage, if you would read it (https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/space-colonization#space-infrastructure). If you're not satisfied with that, a deeper dive is covered in Futurist Fantasies: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPXKWDVC
Yes, civilization collapse due to global fossil fuel depletion is likely. Over 80% of humanity's current energy consumption is fossil fuels. Even if you replace what you can with nuclear, you still can't power gasoline-engine vehicles with nuclear power, so running out of oil is a *huge* concern. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/technology#modern-civilization-permanent-collapse
Asteroid mining is not practical. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/space-colonization#asteroid-mining
Yes, I have studied this topic in a serious way. Seriously dude, humanity hasn't even colonized Antarctica yet. Why the hell should we colonize Mars when we haven't even colonized the backyard yet?? If you think deeply and hard enough about that question (Why haven't we colonized Antarctica yet?), you might realize why we aren't going to colonize Mars, and why it's not worth doing so.
There are no such things as natural resources. Humans create resources through ingenuity and intelligence. Resources are practically unbounded. Julian Simon understood this. So does Robert Zubrin.
Yes, there *is* such a thing as natural resources. Natural resources are resources that are not created via human labor, like land. Humans don't create land. Humans can't create land. It is nonsensical to say that land does not exist in fixed supply. You don't know what you're talking about.
No, resources are NOT unbounded. That's nonsense. There are hard limits to all resources. Julian Simon did not understand reality. Paul Ehrlich offered Simon a second bet, which Ehrlich would've won if Simon accepted it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager#The_proposed_second_wager
As for Zubrin, he has unrealistic aspirations for the future. Humanity will probably never colonize Mars. Human will certainly not colonize Mars for at least 150-200 years. I already explained this in the prior comment's link. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/space-colonization
You may be in denial about all this, but you will learn the truth eventually, even if it has to be done the hard way. Reality always wins. The reality is that natural resources are finite. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation
This assumes we will need extra people when robotics and AI are clearly going to replace many jobs and increase productivity. It also assumes companies don't pay taxes, often the case in modern society with multinationals but this is a modern idea. We should stop companies shipping abroad wealth through licencing and other tax avoidance schemes, they will have to up wages to the point capital investment is worth their while, then we get productivity increases. We'd also have to stop immigration so pressure is put on employers to invest.
I'm confused. Are you under the impression that sales and corporation taxes don't exist?
If you think multinational corporations pay corporation taxes at the advertised rates then no wonder you're confused. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/mar/30/starbucks-uk-corporation-tax-profit-administrative-expenses-royalties
Corporations pay around half a trillion dollars per year.
Can you be more vague? Which corporations and where?
What Max said. Also, it's not like private individuals can't take advantage of tax loopholes.
If your only example here is a company with less than 100m gross profit, I think I can dismiss this as trivial. In any case, deducting legitimate business expenses for tax purposes is something any self-employed person can do.
If you don't realise that the gross profit is small because they've used various loopholes, like licencing their own name to themselves at extortionate cost and selling themselves coffee beans from Switzerland, both true, then I guess you're incredibly naive. "Any self-employed person" cannot do that in the UK.
Hi Craig! Long time, no see.
This piece cites an article about Israel from More Births, which really just gestures at a solution, and ends up saying, essentially, that Israel has a high fertility culture because it is culturally pro fertility. There is no explanation of why this is the case, other than pointing to a suite of pro natalist policies that have already been adopted by lots of other countries with little or no success. For an actual explanation see https://nonzionism.com/p/why-is-israel-fertile
How about aggressively subsidizing surrogacy as well, not just IVF and embryo selection (and, in the future, IVG as well)?
Can you techno-natalists just admit you want to mass produce bugmen in vats?
Humans, not bugmen lol.
When it gets to the point that they're being grown in vats, effectively eusocially, they're bugmen almost by definition.
Then there will be a lot of bugmen once artificial wombs will be developed.
Definitely a feel-good puff piece eliding over the fact that moving fertility rates up is probably THE hardest problem faced by every country in the world, with literally nothing working.
Many things have been tried to practically no effect:
* $10k bonuses per child (Singapore), or for 2nd / 3rd children (Russia)
* 3 years paid parental leave (France)
* 480 days paid leave at 80% wage (Sweden)
* Income tax exemption for mothers with 4 or more kids (Hungary)
* Free state paid child care (France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia)
* Free IVF (most EU countries)
* $750 / month payments per child (South Korea)
And essentially none of these have moved the needle. Often they don’t have any positive impact at all on rates, fertility still declines, but slower. The most any fertility intervention does if they are positive is to buff rates by ~5-10% or so for 1-3 years, after which fertility rates collapse and resume the same trajectory they were on before.
Saying "hey guys, if we solve this, the hardest social problem every developed country in the world has faced unsucessfully so far, we'll be doing great!" doesn't really speak to any realistic assessment of the problem.
We may as well just shrug and say "AI will solve it," because after all if we get super-intelligent aligned AI and UBI all Americans so nobody needs to work if they don't want to, we'll be doing great, too!
Also, if unicorns existed and dispensed precious metals and fine Swiss chocolates, and everyone had a little herd of them, we'd be doing great in that future, too!
Hungary's TFR has been bumped up when you control for the number of women of fertile age remaining in the country, but I'll agree that most pro-natal incentives have had pretty modest effects. (On the cultural side, it's also highly unclear that MAXIMUM FREEEEEEDOM is supposed to be the solution here, given that family formation inherently creates obligations and bonds you can't get responsibly away from.)
At the same time, countries can't just throw their hands up and declare 'nothing is to be done' about the single most pressing problem of our age (unless we figure out some way to abolish the ageing process.)
I think Elon tweeted something about Mongolia and Georgia noticeably raising fertility rates through medals of honour and religious endorsements, so maybe some of that is replicable elsewhere? Native Swedes are around replacement at the top end of the SES spectrum as well, apparently.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7964302.stm
https://theworld.org/stories/2016/08/01/mongolia-where-motherhood-merits-medal
...2.69 TFR, up from 1.95, is pretty respectable.
Yes. The fundamental problem is cultural, and low fertility is just the symptom that's easiest to measure.
"The governments of other nations are certainly realizing that demography accounts for a substantial part of national destiny."
Pronatalism, yes, but quality over quantity.
Especially more white children.
A trifle jingoistic. That is, too partisan for my liking, though I concur the birth rate will rise when when children and family are valued more.
Generally agree with the thrust of this article, but it’s cringe that you associate protectionism and immigration restrictions with high wages. Aporia articles often seem opposed to the mainstream consensus in economics on trade and immigration, without really providing evidence for this opposition.
If you’re suggesting that the mainstream position on immigration is that it raises wages then you’re the one that needs to explain your cringe take.
Supply of labor goes up, price of labor goes down. Consider yourself explained.
It’s pretty self-evident that immigration restrictionism benefits native-born poor and working classes while mass immigration benefits those business interests who profit off cheap immigrant labor. Neoliberal economics and foreign policy are socially and economically destructive on multiple levels to ordinary people while beneficial for certain wealthy individuals and corporate interests.
There are certain conditions where immigration can long-term raise wages if and when the migrants in question start new companies or invent new goods/services, raise GDP, et cetera, but this is also something of a zero-sum game at the global level.