Been seeing a lot of stuff on the news about population decline, especially in the states and in China and Japan. Mainly about people having less kids and getting pets instead or just staying single. Thoughts?
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I think it’s a really good thing.
Much of the health of this planet has been damaged by too many human beings, and I do believe that overpopulation is an existential threat to humanity.
I have never had children, and I’m fine with that . . . as I strongly suspect that my autism might have made me a bad parent.
A big concern that I do have is that I don’t want to see us become a version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” if organized religion takes over and outlaws birth control because “the Bible says to be fruitful and multiply.”
I have spoken with any number of religious people who believe that overpopulation is a myth, and that scares me.
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In a practical sense, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to raise a cat than a child. Cats, dogs horses…whatever, do not require the investment it time a human child does, either. They never use social media, run up your phone bill or entail calls from a principal…
From a human perspective, animals live in the moment. Humans suffer with this dynamic. We carry baggage along with us for decades. Animals, unless they’re severely abused, don’t. This is a natural grounding mechanism animals can provide to humans
Pets have the benefit of unconditional love. You could have burned your mother’s house down and the dog will still wag his tail when you walk through the door.
To me, the greatest feature in animals is their lack of judgement and their innate ability to see through facades.
Marriage and children typically do not come with these features from the factory.
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It is just the organic effect of the cause of scarcity. People are having fewer children because they can’t afford them and would be bringing them into a world where it’s uncertain they would have a decent shot at personal happiness anyway.
Other factors are in play as well. Until maybe recently it was perceived that you needed higher education to make decent money, which meant years in college and grad school and marriage and child bearing pushed further & further back. Last I looked (quite awhile ago) the average age of marriage was 28, up from something like 21 a few decades ago. On top of that you have student debt to struggle with before you even have the money / energy suck and buzz kill that are children.
Of the four children my wife & I have between us, three explicitly chose not to have children of their own (though of course that could theoretically change, they seem pretty set about it). In any case the fourth one made up for them all by having FIVE children – a choice she now finally understands was … unwise. But that # of children is very unusual these days.
Over population has always been a self limiting problem. All reproduction plus raising children to a state of self-sufficiency is dependent on adequate resources and decent circumstances. There was never going to be trillions of people on this planet, or dystopias like the classic Star Trek episode where people are packed together on a planet like sardines. There has to be someplace left to take a dump after all – or to have sex and make babies in the first place. People would die of disease in that situation long before it got that cheek-to-jowl.
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the world’s population is growing, not shrinking
That depends on where you’re looking. Overall, yes, but the growth is not uniform.
I doubt that it was ever uniform, that just isn’t how the world works.
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It’s just inertia. It is shrinking in parts of the world and it’s projected to begin to contract overall not later than 2080. In fact quite sharply after that point, in some scenarios. Depends on how quickly resources are exhausted, whether Trump starts a nuclear war, or oligarchs find a way to burn it down faster – stuff like that.
In any case the main point is that there’s a built-in ceiling on how much it CAN grow.
I’ve always felt the core problem is not population growth itself but our bad stewardship of the biosphere, of which population growth is but one facet. Paving everything over is a separate issue from having babies.
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Nope, not me extrapolating.
Right, it is you citing the 50+ year extrapolation of others.
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What is your point? Are you stating that population will not peak and will grow indefinitely? Sources?
I don’t claim to know the future or have any sources of future information. What I do know is that the past extrapolations on population were wrong, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess: today’s extrapolations are also wrong.
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The human population is exploding exponentially and globally, we live on a planet with finite resources, I’d say anything else we do is just a band aid until we control that.
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There have been a lot of panicky predictions about population growth since the 1970s and none of those have happened. All of them to my knowledge were predictions of massive growth with disastrous civilization-ending results. None of them materialized. Current credible predictions by people who don’t have books to sell say that population growth is in fact leveling off and will begin to drop. This is not in dispute beyond some quibbling over exactly whether it will be in 2084 as the UN projects, or 10 or 20 years sooner, and also how precipitously the world population will drop afterwards. Most of the models assume things about the stability of the “world order” and the sustainability of capitalistic enterprise without any constraints, so I think they are actually under-predicting the rate of decline. Some suggest that by 2200 there will be maybe a half billion people left on the planet. But of course no one can know for sure.
This, at the risk of sounding too cynical, is a self correcting problem.
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population decline might sound like a good thing if it happens everywhere because there are too many human beings and not enough resources BUT here’s the thing, though those countries have a decline, population decline happens only on CERTAIN places because you got impoverished countries like South Sudan, Somalia, and Angola having the world’s fastest growing population.
so what are my thoughts that impoverished nations are producing humans really fast? not good
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