We don’t need a higher birth rate … we need a better quality of life for everyone.
It’s almost like if people had free time, a positive outlook on life, and resources to live comfortably that babies would be a natural outcome.
Yeah, Hans Rossling had a cool tes talk about the direct correlation between family sizes and access to healthcare. If the life expectancy goes up, family sizes go down. The talk
Now we have reached a point where the system in a lot of countries works against the forever growth as people need to work work work and don’t see a future for themselves, let alone for a family.
Hopefully not.
Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say that as long as global population is going up, we’re having too many, not too few. Once it levels off we may have to think about whether we want to degrow the population or just leave it.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if by the 2080s, “peak human” according to the quoted estimate, Brave New World baby factories are an option should we need them.
The main driver of population growth is people living longer. The problem with less babies being born means less young labourers for all the old fucks to exploit. Logan’s Run would be a better sci-fi system to adopt.
Right now it’s still birth rate, to be clear. Life expectancy as gone up by mere years over the decades, while births per adult woman is still double digit in a few select countries.
Biology is a field that’s growing explosively these days, though, and I fully expect aging to settle down suddenly. I’ll have to look up what Logan’s Run is.
Edit: 30 is definitely too low for a maximum age, lol. People commonly work into their 60s. I expect that decline in age will slow down as well, so that helps offset things, and then if there’s still a population crunch geezers like me should start doing “lotteries”. Maybe literal Russian roulette, for the style factor.
The issue is growth rates are wildly different among different areas and cultures. The population in some places is dropping precipitously which will cause economic problems, especially around elder care.
While I agree that a gradual population reduction would be beneficial, rapid declines will increase human suffering and should be avoided.
The world population has nearly doubled in my lifetime. That’s not sustainable. We need to build systems that promote and function within a state of equilibrium.
The first publishing of “Limits to Growth” suggested that if immediate actions were done to curtail growth and use of resources, the world could possibly in many decades peak and then come back down to a sustainable flat line. That was in 1970. 54 years ago we may have had a chance - although the research didn’t include many things not known to them, including the impact of climate change that was already underway and just not obvious (the ocean was buffering much of the effects for a long time).
My non-scientific opinion is that crossing the line of hunter-gatherer to agriculture was the real point of no return. We gained a lot from that, but it also sealed our path and fate. Finding the rich energy source of petroleum was the final accelerant.
I don’t know. Do we really need to replace another 8.2 billion people, does that line really need to go up?
No, but we also don’t want that line to suddenly plummet either.
Think of it this way: birth rate of one is half replacement value and most developed countries are there. We’re already having half the children we need to stay level but it’s not obvious because of the larger generations still living. In 20 years, that half population will half yet again, one quarter the children to level off. Then those older generations age out, and you get larger generations replaced by multiple halvings. For example if you live three generations, then at the end of your life, the population is only 1/8 what it was. Obviously it won’t be this simple and many things could affect birthrate but I find this trend frightening for humanity’s future. We’re not talking lower population but facing the possibility of a crashing population
The birthrate BS is already being used as reasons for controlling women. The only down fall is Religious nut bags and Republican assholes losing control over the other sex.
A better way of life automatically equals the natural number of children. There’s no need for another 9 billion people. There is a very strong need of a better life for 8 billion of us.
Is an high birthrate actually a good thing?
For the planet? No. For capitalism, yes.
Hard to have infinite growth without infinite growth.
All the Neo-Malthusian BS in this thread, holy crap. The “overpopulation is the problem” has got to be one of the best ways for governments, corpos, and the rich to deflect attention from their failures and excesses. Hands down even better than the “personal carbon footprint” propaganda.
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earth has a resource distribution/use efficiency issues right now; the rich are greedy and wasteful.
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don’t want to have kids? Fine, don’t! Kids deserve parents that want them, and you deserve your autonomy to live your life as more than a means to an end for demographics.
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if governments addressed the resource hoarding and waste, more people who want to have kids would have them because they would have enough to have a good quality of life and standard of living, and we would also have addressed things like climate change and dystopic corpo control.
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The Guardian - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for The Guardian:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: Medium - Factual Reporting: Mixed - United Kingdom
Wikipedia about this sourceSearch topics on Ground.News
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/11/global-birthrates-dropping
the US has already implemented policy changes to combat the problem
Maybe we need more fucking and less babies. Fucking makes people happy for nearly free, just the price of condoms. To continuously depopulate, we would want to have deathbed parties for old fucks, or parties at the morg.
Maybe another pandemic? And we just ignore all we learned and we go around spitting on every door knob?
Governments needs more slaves and army conscripts, hurry up and have more children
The depopulation plan it’s going smooth…
