And isn't that what drives the forced birthers?

It's just that that whole white supremacy gig Trump's
got going relies on huge fear of being a minority
race...

which whites already are, but that doesn't matter to
them cuz they're cray cray.

High birthrates are incompatible with women's rights. Period. Douthat and his fellow travelers are not only misogynists, they are also racists.

The 1950s were an aberration. THAT is a fact.

I refuse to pay attention to him anymore. He's not worth the effort.

Seems like the world is way overpopulated with humans. A dropping birth rate is better than some other possibilities.

Birthrates have been falling for decades, and in this country I've seen reports that whites will be hugely outnumbered in just a few more years. It scares the racists because if the black and brown people outnumber the whites, they'll be mean to the white people. Such horrible things. I wonder if that's why the MAGAs are trying to remove black history? If no one knows about slavery, maybe they won't figure out how to enslave white people? Of course, it's not like slavery is anything new to the human race, we've been doing it for millennia, after all. It's even in the BIBLE!

as a 46 year old single woman, 16 years ago. It seems that I performed a major service for them (in their view) and they can damn well show their appreciation.

Erase Black history so, they being in the majority, will
not know how to enslave anyone.

That really takes some special kind of stupid and crazy to
even form a concept of.

A lot of white Republicans are terrified of becoming the minority. Not quite sure, to be honest.

To actually get white women to give birth -- that would
be some rabbit hole they'd be going down...

just insane.

If somebody asks who's going to do the work, AI and robots.

God help us.

I think cost of living is the main reason younger people are choosing not to have kids. I wouldn't call tax incentives "forced-birther,"" but I will say they don't appear to work. Not sure what the solution is, but we've created a society where most people can't afford to start a family until they're in their 40's.

and what was the population at that time?

We need more young workers to support retirees for example. But obviously that's an endless growth cycle and doesn't work on a planet with limited resources. Mostly I think it's a failure of imagination that they can only think of how our economy works today and not how it could work and the reality that even if in theory the planet could support endless population growth, few people would want to live in that world.

Endless continuous growth isn't sustainable.

Are you willing to accept austerity and the elimination of social programs altogether? Because as the US ages out, the government, no matter how much they go after billionaires, are going to struggle funding all these programs.

And if there's a further shift to an unemployable population because of the economy collapsing, that will limit additional funding.

In a world where the population declines, the hardest hit are the most vulnerable because they are the ones who count on the resources that will be the first to go.

The planet doesn't have the resources for all 8 billion to live like Americans or western Europe, much less if we have to keep increasing the population.

There are things we can cut, military spending for example. But yes it will also require changes to the social safety net whether it's retiring later or making people save more (whether through increased social security withholding or enforced 401k savings), or moving away from our current health insurance model. But pretending there's limitless resources and endless growth is possible isn't compatible with the planet. The only thing that grows endlessly is cancer and that kills the host.

You can cut every cent from the military and if the population slows to a point where elderly Americans far out-pace the rest of society, it won't matter.

The earth is just fine. The issue isn't 8 billion people. The issue is how we handle the resources. You could eliminate half that 8 billion and still face the same problem because of where the resources are being pulled from. It's not a population issue, it's a development issue. From the way we build our cities, to the energy we consume.

But in the end, the government won't be able to sustain poor and elderly people if the population plateaus and that's where you'll start needing to eliminate specific government spending.

We should promote more people.

America would be a far better place with 1 billion people and smart, sustainable development than a country of 400 million with an aging population and outdated development and energy ideas.

We've commandeered so much of the planet's natural resources that we've kicked off a mass extinction event to rival the loss of the dinosaurs. And we've altered the atmosphere so much that we've locked in several degrees of warming over the next century that threaten to make large parts of the planet too hot for humans to inhabit.

Your own argument betrays you. Even if we managed our resources better today, you still call for ever-increasing population growth for the sake of more growth. Eventually that model runs out of resources, no matter how well they're managed. Except if the population hits this limit at 16 billion instead of 8 billion, the crash will be even bigger, and almost nothing of the natural world would remain.

I keep seeing the planet Corsecant from Star Wars in this argument: a world paved over by a global city from pole to pole to support a population of tens of billions.

The earth will be just fine.

Again, the issue isn't population. A fraction of the population is responsible for the issues facing earth. Population is irrelevant. Like I said, you could halve the earth's population and the same issues would persist. It's not a population issue. People aren't dying because we're overpopulated. They're dying because we aren't using our resources efficiently.

Like I said, I'd rather the US gain a billion people and proper, smart development with alternative energy sources than remain at 400 million with little to no progress because that will ultimately hurt the planet way more than more people.

YOU'RE NUTS.
A billion people here?
Triple our population?

Yeah. THAT'S a solution.

The US is a vast, massive nation. We are not overcrowded. The only nutso idea here is letting the elderly starve and the poor go without because you're terrified of a little population increase. The world, and the US, is not overpopulated. The issue isn't overpopulation and I'm afraid the simplicity of that belief is going to drive us further into extinction because it does nothing to address the actual issues.

AS I SAID: you could eliminate half the world's population tomorrow and it wouldn't solve a damn thing.

consumer products by tearing up ever greater areas of the Amazon, and dumping ever greater amounts of pollutants into the environment, while ensuring that CEOs keep accumulating more wealth, is the only way to ensure that social programs can exist and function?

What I was saying was that we need to come up with new models and paradigms and maybe think outside the box, so we can figure out how to achieve desired social goals without maintaining unsustainable "growth".

Damn. Sometimes I make the mistake of thinking I'm on a progressive board, but then I read a little bit and get corrected.

It's easy to debate when you throw out straw man arguments.

Your points are irrelevant to actual population. It sounds like your issue isn't with population growth but the economics of a throwaway society. That should be where your focus is - not on population expanding.

Because guess what? You could eliminate half the world's population and nothing would change because we refuse to address smart and sustainable growth.

You want to see why population growth is vital?

Just look at Detroit or St. Louis.

In 1940, Detroit was the 4th largest city in the US with a population of 1,623,452. St. Louis was 8th at 816,048.

Today? Detroit is 26th with 645,705.

From 1940 to 2024, Detroit lost nearly a million people!

Do you think they're better off economically and socially?

St. Louis is now the 80th largest city in the US with a population of 279,695. They lost a staggering amount of people.

Do you think St. Louis is better off?

The issue isn't population. The issue is growth and how we actually grow.

The US can be way more unsustainable economically, environmentally and in terms of development at its current population than if they added another 500 million people. THAT IS THE POINT. It's not how much you grow by - it's how you grow. The US sucks in that regard and why it's unsustainable. That should be our focus or in 50 years, all the US will look look like Detroit.

The population fluctuations of a couple of American cities have absolutely nothing to do with global population increase that must, if it continues, exceed the carrying capacity of the planet.

I'm done discussing this with you, and if you reply, I will put you on ignore.

The editorial in the OP is incompatible with liberalism. I skimmed it, but I got that much clearly.

Meanwhile, overpopulation IS the issue, not declining fertility. Demographic shift could be problematic, but it can be dealt with - LIBERALLY and HUMANELY - at least as easily as any of the fantasies proposed in the OP's link; or the fantasy of the wealthy suddenly caring about the suffering of the masses.

https://democraticunderground.com/100220251008

https://democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=20356511

You could eliminate half the world's population tomorrow and the world would not be better for it. The same issues we're facing today would still exist because it does not address the real issue: HOW WE GROW.

You can't support a society economically and socially once it stats hemorrhaging people. It just isn't going to happen. The workforce thins out, the tax base evaporates and social programs become completely unsustainable.

Why do you think places like Detroit, which at one point was the 4th largest city in the US, have struggled the last 50 years? I promise you, it's not because they're rapidly growing and can't sustain that growth.

They are struggling because since the 1940s, the city has lost close to one million people.

Zero growth didn't help Detroit. It didn't help Cleveland. It didn't help St. Louis.

There is no overpopulation in the US. That is just a lie.

The problem is development and our refusal to develop smart cities that help us retain resources.

The US can be way more unsustainable economically, environmentally and in terms of development at its current population than if they added another 500 million people. THAT IS THE POINT. It's not how much you grow by - it's how you grow. The US sucks in that regard and why it's unsustainable. That should be our focus or in 50 years, or the US will look look like Detroit.

at least the way it's been practiced til now. Gung-ho capitalists like it when there's population growth because that means both more markets and more cheap labor. The few examples of population decline we have - Europe after the Black Death in the 1300s - led to the lower classes getting uppity and demanding things like living wages and decent working conditions (which they got for a time).

The population of the planet was a tad less than 3 billion when I was born; it's now over 8 billion. I'd like to see it come back down, and the only humane ways I can see of doing that are better education for girls and access to better family planning worldwide.

The Human Species is very adaptable.
The question really is, can the people who are comfortable now remain comfortable as things start to break down, or will we destroy ourselves with Social Media induced fear-mongering?

Modern Technocrats are selfish, short-sighted idiots.
Modern scientists and engineers are not and could help maintain civilization through population and resource availability ups and downs, but they're not the ones " driving the rocket ship " (as it were) and pushing mental stress and anxiety trying to manipulate things for their own benefit.
And I'm sure the Technocrats are so busy building their own reality they don't understand what's going on and what is the real optimal way forward for everyone.

There's something close to 8 billion people on this planet, with the number projected to reach 10 billion sometime before the end of the century.
Dropping human birthrate is a good thing for the survival of the planet and all the species on it.

The Earth is just a rock in space that could be destroyed from its planet form, but it cannot "die" in the sense that we know death.

or "save the planet" or any similar variation, they mean "survival of the planetary ecosystem". It's just rhetorical shorthand, and quite clear in context. Calling it out as technically inaccurate just deflects from the point, and is not useful unless deflection is exactly what you want to do.

The Earth abides because it was never alive and cannot ever die.

because they use a common phrase that every sensible person knows what they mean?

The Earth might abide - but not necessarily the LIFE that's on it.

Do you think it is unimportant to care about the biosphere? ( biosphere: another proper term for what people often call "the planet" )

... declining markets
... reduced property values
... no reliable way to invest for the future

It's not that these problems are all impossible to overcome. But they DO require a radical rethinking of world economies.

But I would add that infinitely increasing population is certainly not sustainable.

The question is what population is sustainable, and how do we get there. The answer to the first part depends a great deal on the quality of life granted to that population: the higher the population, the lower the quality of life for the vast majority.

But we already know that the very rich do not care one bit about the quality of life of the masses - they just want exploitable workers for their next schemes.

This article is pretty out there honestly.

The article is full of wacky opinions and conclusions. Its just not grounded in reality. In fs t it's a stealth approach to inject religion into everyone's lives by force.

seriously.

an aging population is 1 thing, but just a smaller population? less competition for resources, fewer wars? less environmental damage?

i dont think this is simple, but a lot pf ppl seem to think it is. i think an ever expanding economy is y the planet is on fire. i guess it’s possible to get to the point where our consumer lifestyle starts to fall apart. but i’m not convinced that’s a bad thing. somehow we’ll survive what we already lived through.

Once people have what they need to sustain their basic lifestyle they start to want things they perceive as being "nicer" or more desirable rather than basic necessities. And this is one of the problems of capitalism: to keep going it has to keep creating "needs": bigger houses, bigger vacations, bigger everything. I'm hardly blameless.

Doubthat (deliberate misspelling) and his ilk harken back to the days when people like them lived lives of leisure, with the time and ability to pontificate on what caught their fancies, while armies of newly arrived immigrants toiled for 60 hours a week in factories (pre-OSHA of course) and were happy to get the work because they thought it was a better deal than where they came from. But they seem to assume that those days will come back to the US, and Americans who grew up in the age of plenty will cheerfully go back to assembly line work.

dont make enough to meet basic needs…

suffer when that happens. (In 5 years, according to people who work in AI.)

Which makes me think a big part of the decline is women deciding they don’t want kids and doing what they need to do to stop it.

Muslim women don’t get a choice in the matter so that birth rate hasn’t declined ( btw I am speaking of muslim women in under developed countries, I have no idea what choices they have in modern societies like America)

High birthrates are incompatible with women's rights. You can't have both.

Douthat is a right-wing hack. He was helping to peddle the Robin Hanson bullshit about the "redistribution of sex." Jordan Peterson was peddling the same bullshit.

So what if marriage is dying out? Good fucking riddance to it.

Can you find one single other person who agrees with her? I can't. Why should I care about what some insane idiot is babbling about? Not remotely scary - just sad.

them out, but I have read this before.

I just think the conclusion is silly in the face of a burning planet and the prospect of AI making us obsolete anyway.

Seems like Trump isn't worried about depopulation in the U.S. or the world.

All his policies kill people.

social safety net fails, it's government cheese again. Or some version of UBI. No species ever died out from not having enough sex, AFAIK.

Oh, if the fertility rates are dropping from chemical poison and pollution, well I know what party is primarily responsible for that, and they can go F themselves for suddenly getting a clue.

I don't worry about it. We'll manage.

and is doing his part to try to stop the extinction of white people by using IVF to impregnate as many women as possible.

It's generally a popular right wing talking point.

Personally, I think we have exceeded the Earth's carrying capacity. At least if we want other species and ecosystems to continue existing on the planet.

BTW, do you know when the human population first reached one billion?

42 years, we managed to double that. I have thought for years that earth could use a rest. Even my 17 year old nephew was talking about a vasectomy with his parents, we found out at his b-day party last week, for many of the reasons mentioned here.

Personally, I think too many people = competition for jobs = lower wages, a win for business. Simple.

It reached 2 billion in 1927.

However did we manage with so few people in the world?

/sarcasm

And I'm not that old. That kind of population growth is leading to catastrophic warming and pollution that will kill us all off anyway if we don't reverse it.

The concerns Evans seems to have are 1) economic and 2) social, in that she thinks women and men are not relating anymore on a meaningful level.

As far as the economics go, tax the rich. The end. Just tax the damn rich and that problem is solved.

As far as the social issues go, she is spouting the manosphere nonsense that, "Women, as they gain independence, are only going for the most eligible men." Every time I hear that, I want to say, "Show me some evidence that men, in droves, are trying to date unattractive women." Then I'll take it seriously when someone says, "80% of women go for 20% of men" as if that's a problem and as if men have not always done the same thing.

A drop in population is a benefit. The objections come from men who think they should be getting more sex than they are because their dad was nothing special and managed to get married. They want to bring back the times when women were desperate to marry because there was no way for them to make a living, so they needed to have a man to survive. Screw that.

I don’t take interviews or articles like this seriously because the motivation is that same nonsense that was spewed by Ben Wattenberg years ago about a birth dearth in the United States when the baby boomers were not having what he thought were enough kids. It was all bullshit then and it’s all bullshit now.

Yes, it is these men of the MRA sort who are whining because they aren’t getting laid and they aren’t getting waited on hand and foot like their fathers and grandfathers were. The 1950s are never coming back. They were aberrant to begin with.

And if that brings the population down, all the better.

We just need to adjust society to accommodate lower birth rates. Whenever pro-natalist discussions happen, there’s always a touch of (or outright) misogyny and authoritarianism with them.

has Evans considered that fertility rates are dropping, not from the iPhone, internet, liberalism, and women's rights, but from simple population density?

Other animals experience fewer births when overcrowding occurs, perhaps by some unknown mechanism that kicks in to maintain a dynamic equilibrium in the population.

Why should we be any different? And, I'm not convinced that fewer people is necessarily a bad thing.

... as endorsing some group's solution. Knee jerk "conversation."

There's 8 billion people on earth.

I still don't see the problem.

and it's done frequently here.

But a massive population drop too fast will also cause huge problems (China is about to find this out, as they're about to reach a massive cliff according to models given their 40+ year 1 child policy and favoring boys to girls). Even if you tax the bejesus out of the rich, governments won't have the money for a lot of stuff we take for granted. Countries will have to cut spending in massive ways or go bankrupt.

Best case scenario is a fairly stable population or a slow population decline so things won't get too out of whack too fast.

... forceed-birthers!!! bandwagon. It's sometimes hard to get a problem addressed beyond looking at some groups' solutions and screaming Nazis!!

It's actually a good thing.

https://populationconnection.org/blog/world-population-day-five-reasons-to-stop-panicking-over-low-birth-rates/

World Population Day: Five reasons to stop panicking over low birth rates

and once they reach around six, you can chuck them into the mines and make them useful.

along with a massive decline in our livestock population. Only capitalist propaganda will say otherwise.

knowing that if it goes to hell, they're going to die because it's been made illegal to save their lives? That even a miscarriage may result in police investigation and a possibility of being convicted and punished? That their entire function in life is to successfully give birth and any failure will result in significant consequences?

You go first.

...the problem and the various proposed responses. Presenting a problem for discussion does not imply endorsing one particular solution. How can we arrive at good solutions with knee jerk reactions like this?

is a great way to control people.

If there is a significant decline in people willing(?) to pick crops from hot fields due to the risk of deportation, the subsequent rotting of unpicked crops is likely to cause a lot of shortages of food.
If those same farmers then suffer more incidents of pandemic infection because they tend to be more on the political right end of the spectrum, and their 'gods' discourage them and their staff from wearing masks, or getting inoculations, the death toll will rise, and people available in the farms will drop further (potentially including the managers/owners).

IMHO the oligarchs can't see their own noses due to their self-congratulatory introspective viewpoints.

A lot of mutual aid is going to be necessary. Those oligarchs are going to lose out VERY heavily in the long term if they don't change their perspectives. Every game theory expert will tell you cooperation gets far more results than any form of fear-based or combative strategy. We would all do well to learn from that.

GOP and Mango Menace don't seem to be capable of any compassion, or cooperation. A significant flaw in their mental makeup, IMHO.

We used to joke, saying that we were radiating ourselves with our old first gen Motorolas.

So far, our family are a net plus.

with more of everything to go around, less wear & tear on infrastructure, less tension & stress. The World use to have a smaller population.

I skimmed the article. 90% of it is about "why oh why is fertility declining, and what can we do about it?!!1??"

It is NOT about, and does not present, any compelling argument as to WHY IT IS A PROBLEM.

Early on there is the usual "demographic shift" canard.

Well GUESS FUCKING WHAT. Old people, and people in general, will be working less ANYWAY. BECAUSE AI. Or "automation" if you think AI is overhyped (I partially agree there ... but it will over time take more and more jobs ... until civilization collapses due to the REAL issue, discussed below ).

THE PROBLEM IS NOT DEMOGRAPHICS.

The problem is, AS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN, the distribution of Earth's resources.

And GUESS FUCKING WHAT #2? Overpopulation + overconsumption is inevitably destroying resources at an alarming rate. Meanwhile the billionaires suck out as much as they can, for what? So they can have more private planes and personal stewards, while other people starve? Meanwhile they do everything they can to drive down wages and social safety net support for us, and reduce their own taxes. So they can just get richer. Again, for what? Maybe some of these assholes think eventually enough $$$$$$$$$$ will buy them eternal life? As if any normal person would even want that ...

Now, let's talk about the actual problem ...

Yes, there will be fewer young, healthy people to support the aging population. But that said, the fact is that the "aging population" is - or at least damned well could and should be - a helluva a lot healthier than in prior generations. To the extent it isn't the case, a lot of that has to do with people succumbing to marketing (the rich getting richer) to live in unhealthy ways (think candy at the supermarket checkout line, but a million more ways that happens in our society).

So, if we aren't succumbing to capitalism, as old people we CAN work longer if we need to. (in many cases; obviously there are conditions that are separate from whether we indulge in booze or bad diet).

The problem is, the jobs won't be there. Older - experienced! - workers want more pay. Capitalist corporations are run by bean counters who think that person with 35 years experience is too expensive, and they will justify it in their pitch to replace the person as "bringing in fresh ideas" or some bullshit. Never mind that if they cultivated a proper talent pipeline, they would have plenty of new ideas. But they are just counting beans, not thinking humanly.

Meanwhile, wages and services stall or are cut, taxes for the already insanely rich are cut even more, the rich continue to plunder the planet, while encouraging everyone else to join in ... and species die off (we are experiencing that now); climate change - driven also by the plunder party - accelerates the species die off - and pretty soon it will become challenging to support even a relatively small population (compared to the current 8+ billion) on Planet Earth. (Because even though most seem oblivious to the fact, humans really are dependent on the web of life, that we are engaged in destroying.)

Having more babies is NOT going to fix it.

We have millions of people who want to be citizens of this country and we are throwing them out. Why? Because they are not the right color.

They were paying the taxes we needed for our 'civilization' We threw them out. Clearly we do not want more people here.

Muslims accounted for 31% of all births in the world while making up 24% of the population. Muslim women are having 3.1 babies per, well above the replacement rate of 2.1. They lead in that category by a huge margin.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religious-landscape/

The concerns seem to be about a declining population of young people being unable to care for the elderly and infirm. Or empty buildings. Or no one to focus on priorities like climate-saving innovation. Those things will be fixed by automation and AI, imo.

I don't think the lack of incentive for coupling (as in the interview in the OP) is the key problem. Sure, the birthrate will go down if people don't form couples. But parenting is, imo, by far the biggest incentive for coupling long-term. And parenting is very tough right now. Rewarding but tough.

Although many posters in this thread jump to the conclusion that they must be proposing a Handmaid's Tale society. They're not. They're challenging us to think hard, it seems to me.

The idle rich live in mortal terror of a labor deficit. Right now, we have a labor surplus; more people than jobs. This is the means by which the parasitic, consuming classes keep wages and benefits low for the people who do the actual work. And if a worker or groups of workers resist, the parasites can just fire them, and hire the people waiting outside the door for a job.

If there is a labor deficit, as there was after the Black Plague, then there are more jobs than people to do them, and the idle rich have to offer higher wage and better benefits in order to entice people to do the jobs the rich are too lazy to do their own damned selves.

And, as pointed out above, the white supremacists in this country are terrified of being the minority. They know how rotten they've been to people in the minority in the past, and of course, even today. They can dish it out, but they can't take it.