Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet, or because they can't afford the time and resources to adequately raise them.
I've not heard anyone talk about an overpopulation problem in 30 years.
I'm a millennial and I really really like this planet. It's my favorite one. My kids are going to like it here too someday, I hope.
My peers who are skipping kids are mostly doing so because their other ambitions don't align with raising a family, which I totally get. It's a huge trade off, I hope it'll be worth it.
gen x here, and my observation is that millenials tend to let there back brain say whatever the 'expected' response is,as having had it barked at them from birth makes it effortless, and then going back to bieng cagey,mildly subversive, and somewhat ferral in there actual lives.
point of order : there is NO trade off in getting what you want.
As a general rule they won't talk about overpopulation being a problem because they know that the population will likely peak within their children's lifetimes.
They do talk about whether the earth can sustain that population as a reason not to have children. They are correct to. Their children might be the generation who have to explain to their children what fish tasted like.
yes, this is the thing I'm not quite getting from the "malthus was proven wrong" argument. Yes, technology increased food production, but that doesn't mean there isn't a carrying capacity to the earth. We have overfished. Fisheries are in decline all over. I guess you could say "no problem, we'll have lab created or grown fish and it will be fine" ok, maybe. But it's not going to be the same and the oceans won't be the same.
What I don't get from all of the demographic collapse hand-wringing: Somehow in the 1970s we got by with 1/2 as many people as we have now - why would a long, slow decline back down to that number be catastrophic? Why would stabilizing at a lower population be problematic? Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.
One commonly perceived problem is the increase not just in the fraction of the population that is retired, but how long they will remain retired if provided with adequate care, or (more bluntly) how long it takes them to die compared to previous generations. Here in Germany the social system was established when most people died within two-three years of retirement age. Today they can expect to live for more than fifteen years, thanks in part to more expensive health care (cardiac arrest used to be effectively lethal, if not immediately then through subsequent arrests, now it's generally survivable with expensive care). The current retirees are entitled to this, having paid into the system, but current workers can look upon their own increasing contributions and the overall maths and feel uneasy that though paying more they may receive less.
The retirement age is now slowly being raised, and given time the system may level, but in the meantime "issues" will indeed present.
Raising the retirement age is one thing, but finding work for those retirees is another. Ageism is rampant (and especially in tech). Maybe that becomes less of an issue when more of the population is older, but I don't think we're there yet.
> Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.
I think you're compressing a lot of hardship into "issues"... It's not about total number of people, it's about demographic distribution. If half of your population is at retirement age, who is going to take care of them? Who will be working to generate tax revenue to provide the social services that you expect?
Also populations don't just stabilize, they feed back off of themselves. If half of your population isn't procreating, you get fewer and fewer babies which is a vicious cycle. There aren't many policy levers to pull during demographic free fall.
The problems you are expecting from demographic free fall aren't going to happen for generations, and at any point during that time people could decide to start having more babies.
I'm not sure it's that easy. There are a lot of people who aren't able to work as they get older for medical reasons. And there's a lot of ageism that keeps older people out of the job market. Maybe that ageism lessens as the population ages, but we're not there yet.
That usually doesn't go super well [1]. Are you good with delaying your retirement 24 months for the greater good? If so, do you think that your fellow citizens would be?
Conversely, I think a lot of people would like to delay retirement and continue working, but they can't because they got let go after they were deemed to be "too old". It's a pretty common occurrence for people in their 60s. And then since your options aren't great you may as well be retired.
The issues might go away sooner than that, because I imagine - naively? - that a society full of old people would put lots of effort into reducing the problems of being old.
Having declined, the population might increase again, and decline again, but with fewer issues the more practice we have. Stability sounds unlikely.
> > Somehow in the 1970s we got by with 1/2 as many people as we have now - why would a long, slow decline back down to that number be catastrophic?
Because we've built an economic system based on the idea that you must, at all costs, grow. Stable success is insufficient and will be seen as failure.
And then we spent many decades programming people to believe this is the only thing that can possible work.
Nothing natural about this at all, it is just the result of the cult of capitalism.
Have we, though? Governments rely on economic growth to fund their plans. That means economic activity has to grow, which means ... something ultimately rather unclear about what people around at the time consider wealth to be. It doesn't mean "everybody into the spawning pools and get busy".
> Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet
They often list overpopulation as a reason. But yes, it's not the only reason they give.
As an antidote to this kind of mindless negativity, just consider whether any individual human is happy to have been born. It seems very clear to me that most people enjoy being alive and so having children is moral on utilitarian grounds.
Most people are doing something morally wrong by not having children, or only having 1 child. That seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.
However, I wouldn't push the point. My view is that "life is good so having children is good" but not "you must have as many children as possible." There are various ways I might justify this philosophically, but I would just say that parents have a special obligation to their children and, if you have too many children, it's impossible to fulfill that obligation. So you should have as many children as you can effectively parent.
The issue is how the MLS (multiple listing service) allows listing of condos/apartments/etc. Since each unit has no actual land to itself, they're allowed to list the total land that the complex sits on for each unit. There's also basically no oversight or correction on what gets listed, so listing agents have no reason to be accurate or perspicacious.
Everyone then scrapes or subscribes to the MLS data. It's why you have a dozen identical realty sites: Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, Trulia, etc.
That's exactly it, thanks for explaining it better than I did. I ran into this early with Vermont ski-resort condos: every unit "had" the acreage of the whole resort. The lot-size field just doesn't fit condos well. The site already hides acreage on listings typed as condos and flags units that resolve to an association's common parcel, but some condos come through typed as townhouses or single-family, and those slip past. Checking the claimed acreage against the actual parcel size is the fix I'm working on.
A good proportion of the older generations still disdain or mock Germany as nazis-in-waiting. There may be an end to the damage done to their global reputation, but it's not here yet 80 years down the line.
> There may be an end to the damage done to their global reputation, but it's not here yet 80 years down
Let's not forget that in the early part of the 20th century, Germany was the powerhouse of mathematics and sciences such as physics and chemistry, to the extent that top scientists basically had to learn German (1) and/or study in Germany (2).
How long did it take Germany to recover that preeminent position?
> to the extent that top scientists basically had to learn German
That reverberates even toady -- I had a physics professor who who learned German precisely because he wanted to read some original texts written by Boltzmann. Apparently he thought he was missing some nuance in the translations.
I think this is going to depend strongly on population. Average age of the mother, width of the pelvic canal, and similar are going to vary widely with culture, race and country.
Computer UIs needed borders and outlines because there are no brain-intuitive visual cues: no depth parallax, no shading, nothing shifts as you move your head, and until relatively recently they had poor contrast and brightness variability compared to the real world.
It was also a compromise for interface device limitations. We didn't have 4000 DPI mice with scroll wheels and 26 configurable buttons; you were lucky to have a 1024x768 resolution; and 16 bit color was for people shelling out $$$. Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click.
Sad watching Apple design repeat Microsoft’s mistake of trying to push through a single UI paradigm across mobile and desktop (and, especially, VR in Apple’s case)
I think the gigantic prevalence of huge or lifted trucks is a bigger influence, especially given the tendency to mod them out (poorly) with aftermarket lights.
Truck headlights are already on a level with sedan drivers' eyes. There are far more F-150s on the road than there are Teslas.
Biomedical research in the US has taken an absolute nose-dive several times over the past decade or two. This was my field for the past 20 years, so I'm fairly familiar.
It requires enormous capital investment and a very, very long time to turn out meaningful results, so it's only available to those with corporate-depth pockets or government subsidies. It also requires a broad and deep skill set.
With the FDA, USDA, NIH, CDC and DoEd all being gutted, the subsidies are gone. Academia can no longer support a huge swath of biomedical research.
> US has taken an absolute nose-dive several times over the past decade or two
This is also my field... and if the nose-dive is what has delivered in these past two decades RNA-seq, induced pluripotent stem cell generation, CRISPR-mediated genome therapies, CAR-T therapy, single-cell RNA and DNA profiling, spatial transcriptomics, targeted GLP- and incretin-modulation therapies? Then that's a wonderful nosedive.
The capital investment has always been true if you want to do R1 research. But you don't have to do that at all! There's also Oxford Nanopore, tons of open data through NCBI and other resources, more open papers than ever.
> It also requires a broad and deep skill set.
Yes. Like anything, being good takes time.
> Academia can no longer support a huge swath of biomedical research.
Maybe. I think there will be money for things that affect the rich (incurable cancer, longevity) and for things that are sexy to the unsophisticated (CZI Biohub 'OpenCell'). But there is money in this, so I don't think academia (to wit, people who know how to do research) will go away, just will change.
I've not heard anyone talk about an overpopulation problem in 30 years.
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