A community for discussing events around the World
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
No one has any money for rent, food, or living expenses.
Everyone is overworked.
We're paid pennies compared to CEO's.
Every single company fucks us by raising prices because they can, and our governments do nothing because they haven't worked for the people in decades..
While that is all generally true, the status of most people in developed countries today is better than its ever been in history.
That's what's driving fertility down. People who have access to education, medical care, relative comfort and security have fewer children.
My wife and I are part of a younger generation whose culture revolves around NOT having children until all those things you mentioned are attained. The stress of even having a kid, let alone multiple, is not something we’re going to address until we hit financial security.
And at least in most places of the world, you are unlikely to ever achieve financial security because the government inflates your fiat currency until it's worthless.
I figure it's a combination of problems. I come home from work exhausted and don't want to go out. So I'm at home alone. On the bad side, the work, the stress, the balance of keeping everything because the way the modern world has gone to make it difficult to look for new jobs especially if you lost yours just makes going out difficult.
But that's because to "go out" I'd have to drive half an hour or more away to maybe a bar. And the bar is filled with people who are going to visit said bar.
We're at a point where it's easier to communicate with people hundreds of miles away instead of someone in our neighborhood, and comfortable enough to do it, while stressed enough to not make the attempts. Stack on those that are married, there's the problem of just having enough time of day from both people having to work overtime.
Pretty sure throughout history most (if not all) generations have worked to give their kids a better (if not approximately equal) quality of life to their own. That isn't feasible for many people, and older generations are frustrated that it wasn't/isn't feasible for many who are currently young adults. That, along with the ability to control if you have kids, makes the choice for many of us. Why would you choose to have kids if their lives are worse than your own and you don't enjoy your own?
This is in the good economies too! In most of Africa life is even shittier. I can only imagine. Well, is still mostly better than it's ever been. History is cruel, and present but at least % of population living decent is much higher globally. Still, USA richest country in the world and we can't Even get universal healthcare, and instead of aiding homeless domestically, or money for food abroad etc.... We give a genocidal maniac hundreds of billions to play with.
Replacement level for whom? To sustain the current population? Population growth? Status quo? Corporations?
Not sure any of these things are needed to be sustained at the levels we are currently at.
Someone please explain the detrimental repercussions of not having an equal to or greater than replacement level.
sure, i'll try to explain briefly
"infrastructure", i.e utilities, transport, bureacracy etc is built to support a fixed population within a city. when the population increases, you have to build more infrastructure to support this new population. this part is easy, you expand your cities at their edges, extend the utilities, and set up satellite bureacracy offices if needed
the tricky part is when you lose population. the correct move would be to demolish this infrastructure and scale back. trouble is, not only would this be wasteful, but it would also leave gaps in cities, since population decline doesn't happen uniformly from a city edge. where exactly, do you demolish the infrastructure?
it would be nice if we live in a theoretical world where, as population decreases, the cities magically shrink at their edges, and suburban residents move closer in to fill the gaps. this is not how populations deplete from an area though (example: detroit, 1950 - 2020)
you will struggle to convince a suburban homeowner at the edge, to sell up and move to one of the gaps left behind by population loss. if we stop short of rewriting laws to force this population transfer, the end result is that you are left with a "swiss cheese" city. houses and settlements will be spread so thinly that becomes impossible for city goverments to provide "infrastructure" without providing it at a loss. your local goverment will then take debt and bankrupt, the infrastructure will collapse through lack of maintenance, and then the remaining population suffers big time
i want to note that i am not using this as an argument to support population growth. i am only stating the big, big problem that needs to be tackled somehow, concerning population loss. some big-brains are going to have to work this problem through, fast!
side note: interestingly, most NA cities are spread out and sprawled so much that they are suffering unaffordable infrastructure bills already, despite not suffering the effects of population loss. goodness knows how these places will fare when population loss actually hits...
This is one problem, but there’s a much bigger problem: the ratio of elderly (retired) to workers will increase substantially. Unless there is some AI productivity boost, many young people will have to work in health care/elderly care and standards of living will deteriorate A LOT.
Not only that, but we're simultaneously talking about how we're adding a force multiplier to labor with the advent and improvement of AI.
We're literally in the process of decoupling social progress and productivity from reliance on population, and juggling the impending social burden that's going to create if jobs decrease accordingly, yet we should be worried we're not popping out kids to maintain population growth?
Why the fuck should we create larger generations of unemployable humans for the future we're building?
Especially when having a kid is one of the worst possible actions you could take regarding environmental impact, and the people already alive are facing quite serious environmental consequences for such impacts.
I'll take a crack.
Slow population loss, while concerning for policy makers, can be managed theoretically by moving money around. Taxation, subsidies, etc.
The US is currently at 1.6 fertility rate. 2.1 is replacement rate, so a pretty steep drop of 25% loss per generation. But we have substantial immigration to make up the shortfall. It's an issue, and it's trending down, but manageable for now.
Fertility rates of 1 or less are terrifying. Each generation is half the size of the one before. Half as many workers supporting the elderly. Retirement/pension systems will be strained then collapse, allowing retirees to fall into poverty. Half as many workers to maintain infrastructure, half as many doctors, half as many nurses, half as many experts in every field, means half as many researchers making discoveries and breakthroughs.
God forbid you go to war and have half as many soldiers to call on, from a workforce already stretched beyond any before. It's a recipe for mass suffering in a scale never before seen.
South Korea and Japan are currently below 1. China might be even lower. People are, generally, resilient and resourceful. Adjustments will be made. People will work into their 70's and 80's because there is work to be done. But there will be a great deal of suffering.
If we didn't rely on constant growth to keep our economy working this would be great news.
Yep, a planned economy is the way to go and more than doable. But so many people are jealous spiteful dimwits. So essentially, we're fucked.
Make the world one that people actually want to live in and this won't be a problem
Maybe stop treating the common person like utter dogshit. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
🥳🥳🥳
Two point one: That’s how many children everyone able to give birth must have to keep the human population from beginning to fall. Demographers have long expected the world will dip below this magic number—known as the replacement level—in the coming decades. A new study published last month in The Lancet, however, puts the tipping point startlingly near: as soon as 2030.
It’s no surprise that fertility is dropping in many countries, which demographers attribute to factors such as higher education levels among people who give birth, rising incomes, and expanded access to contraceptives. The United States is at 1.6 instead of the requisite 2.1, for example, and China and Taiwan are hovering at about 1.2 and one, respectively. But other predictions have estimated more time before the human population reaches the critical juncture. The United Nations Population Division, in a 2022 report, put this tipping point at 2056, and earlier this year, the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a multidisciplinary research organization dedicated to studying population dynamics, forecasted 2040.
Christopher Murray, co-author of the new study and director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), suspects his study’s forecast is conservative. “With each passing year … it’s becoming clearer that fertility is dropping faster than we expect,” he says. Because the 2030 figure is already a hastening of IHME’s previous estimate of 2034, “I would not be surprised at all if things unfold at an even faster rate,” he says.
SIGN UP FOR THE SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily A drop below replacement fertility does not mean global population will immediately fall. It will likely take about 30 additional years, or roughly how long it takes for a new generation to start to reproduce, for the global death rate to exceed the birth rate. Even then, because countries’ fertility may vary dramatically, global fertility rate is a “very abstract concept that doesn’t mean much,” says Patrick Gerland, chief of the Population Estimates and Projection Section of the U.N. Population Division. But he says the trend points to a world increasingly split between low-fertility countries, in which a diminishing number of young people support a burgeoning population of seniors; and high-fertility countries, largely poorer sub-Saharan African nations, where continued population growth could hamper development.
Estimating when the world will reach the turning point is challenging. The new model from IHME is based on how many children each population “cohort”—people born in a specific year—will give birth to over their lifetime. It captures changes such as a move to childbirth later in life. But full cohort fertility data are thus far only available for generations of people older than 50, and so the IHME model builds projections within itself to try to capture trends as they are unfolding.
A steady decline Global fertility has been dropping for several decades. Low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and high-income countries such as the United States and Japan are expected to dip below the level needed to sustain the human population in the coming decades. But a new model says the global fertility rate could drop below the replacement level as soon as 2030.
D. AN-PHAM/SCIENCE In contrast, the U.N. and Wittgenstein models are based on each country’s total fertility rate, or the sum of age-specific fertility rates, typically for those between the ages of 15 and 49, which is considered reproductive age. As a result, temporary fluctuations in childbearing behaviors—say, people decades ago delaying giving birth to children so they could advance in their education and careers—can throw off their projections, and they can miss longer term changes in childbearing behaviors. These models may have been prone to undercounting fertility in the past, then finding a temporary rebound in fertility rate, and therefore predicting a longer time frame for world population decline.
ADVERTISEMENT This is one reason that Wittgenstein is considering moving to a cohort model, says Anne Goujon, director of the Population and Just Societies Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, one of the three institutions that form the Wittgenstein Centre.
Other factors also contribute to the differences between the projections, including how the IHME model accounts for four variables that impact fertility, including access to contraceptives and higher education among those who give birth. (The other two models generally do not, although Wittgenstein considers education.)
Regardless of when the turning point comes, “growing disparity in fertility levels could contribute to widening of [other] disparities,” says Alex Ezeh, a global health professor at Drexel University, who was not involved in the Lancet study. For middle- to high-income, low-fertility countries, falling below replacement level could mean labor shortages and pressure on health care systems, nationalized health insurance, and social security programs. Meanwhile, low-income countries that still have high fertility are at heightened risk of falling further behind on the world’s economic stage, Ezeh says. “They will not be able to make the necessary investments to improve health, well-being, and education” with too few resources to support a booming population.
Although some experts, including Goujon, think there isn’t yet reason for alarm, others call for urgency. “This is going to be a very big challenge for much of the world,” Murray says. “There’s a tendency to dismiss this as sort of like, yeah, we’ll worry about it in the future. But I think it’s becoming more of an issue that has to be tackled sooner rather than later.”
Why would I want to have kids in this shithole. And I have it pretty darn good, always had enough to eat, roof over my head, relative luxuries. Still would never bring a kid into this world.
Why the fuck would I bring to the world someone to live in this overheating unrestrained capitalist hellscape ? Invisible hand my ass. The invisible hand doesn't seem to stop them from poisoning us with forever chemicals... And so much more. Why would I bring someone to suffer ? They would surely have a worse life than me. Who wants to give that to their kids ? Who ?
Sounds like a problem for governments to figure out
Immigration was always an outsourced bandaid for solving population decline.
Nothing wrong with that. Let population levels drip until about 2 billion or so. The rest of the worlds biosphere will thank us. Also all of humanity will thank us as life will become a whole lot more livable
Good. A lower population is truthful and beautiful, as my old philosophy professor would say.
Phew. The population needs to be reduced significantly, this will help!
Get it down to around 35,000 and everyone gets to go to the Superbowl.
Does it really, though?
Every issue "overpopulation" is blamed for is just the fault of corporate greed.
An important point for the people cheering lower population - this is way under replacement level. As previous generations die off and this becomes apparent, the fear is a sudden depopulation enough to disrupt some economies, societies. Picture Detroit, many times over (apologies to Michiganders, since I’ve been to Detroit recently and things are finally looking up after half a century of urban blight) but r pivcture infrastructure like Flint, MI water system many time over. Unstable economies and societies are bad for us all
Given that the article is posted on a science site, and people are discussing this on fairly new technology, I also want to point out that science, technology, innovation are all “luxuries” of an expanding population. As we depopulate and an increasing share of resources go toward elderly care, infrastructure, etc, that’s less for science, technology, innovation.
Some economies could use some disruption. I'm all for shaking things up a bit.
We can still eat the rich, right?
Absolutely.
The book analyzes the elements that lead different nations to succeed or fail, in the author's opinion, focusing on demographic, geographic, and historic factors. It asserts that the period from the 1950s to the 2020s represented a peak period of rapid economic development and innovation; meanwhile, the present (2022) and future would be associated with a rather abrupt slowing of such developments. In this view, deglobalization leads to deindustrialization, deurbanization, and even depopulation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_World_Is_Just_the_Beginning