If you believe extraordinary individuals are a product of nature and we don't know how to nurture them into existence then it makes sense. Whatever confluence of events triggers an Einstein has the greatest number of chances to occur.

Either way it seems dumb to structure our entire economy and future around elder care. I guess that is what you get when people older than 60 have 65% of the wealth and people under 40 have 7%.

I don’t know what the right number is, but 8+ Billion doesn’t seem sustainable. It might be, if humans respected the environment, are nicer to each other etc. Since that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon, the next best option might be to just have less humans, which hopefully might lead to less pollution, less exploitation of the environment etc

The top 1% is freaking out at the thought of population shrinking because the cogs of the machine won’t turn itself.

We only have one modern example of demographic crash to study... Japan.

Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.

So far, it looks to be a way for slow extinction of a culture.

Shot in the dark but my sense is that a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens. I feel pretty confident that ai will eventually be a large driver of growth but I do worry about whether it'll come soon enough.

What is your case at all? AI could usher in a post scarcity world so why not have more humans who can enjoy better lives?

You just said AI Armageddon as if there is an already predetermined ending that is widely agreed upon.

The basis of capitalism is on growth. How can you continue to grow revenue constantly if there aren't more people to buy products or use your services. Additionally tax revenue decreases as fewer people are working, so less government services and employment would be available.

Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it looks like an equilibrium issue since over time it will balance out. But those teachers who are losing their jobs are adults, tax payers, consumers now and the loss of spending has a cascading effect.

You need consumers to buy whatever an economy builds, regardless of AI involvement. As people retire they consume less.

Yeah but logically unless people start matching the replacement rate at some point it’s a lot of pain until you go extinct. Isn’t South Korea supposed to be functionally extinct in less than 100 years at this rate?

The problem isn't if the population gradually shrinks, it's if there's an uncontrolled downward spiral in fertility. If the birthrate gets below a certain point, then most people won't have any experience whatsoever interacting with babies or young children in their day-to-day life, and cultural norms will shift to make childlessness the default option. This marginalizes people who choose to have children, which pushes the birthrate down even further. This has happened in South Korea, where children are barred from many public places and it's hard to find housing in urban areas if you have children because the noise they make will piss off the neighbors. The birthrate is currently ~0.7 births per woman, meaning that every 100 South Koreans will have around 12 grandchildren. Here's a good article if you're interested: https://archive.ph/bM4Ff

A few quotes:

> Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

> An artist named Daum told me that, when he was young, “if you kicked a ball into someone else’s property, you went and rang the doorbell and got it back.” That city no longer existed: “Now you get yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my window!’ ” There’s a special word for noise between floors. Complaints forced Daum and his wife, Dani, to leave their previous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t stand your children anymore!”

> In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.”

I think you’re missing the point, you’re assuming this brief moment will stop. Why would population stop declining?

Well, in the extreme case, human extinction seems like a pretty bad thing.

> other than supporting aging population?

Isn't that enough? Imagine a world where a large percentage of the population are in nursing homes. A humane goal for a nursing home is 10:1 24/7. So that means 1 nurse for every 2.5 residents.

Besides that, it's all about the speed of change. Current Korean levels of population halving every generation is going to cause tremendous upheaval.

Shrinking and growing populations aren't necessarily problematic. What's problematic are populations that shrink or grow too quickly. Infrastructure adapted for N people works well for a number close to N, but not so well for 2N or 0.5N.

There aren't too many people besides Elon Musk that are significantly worried that the US's replacement rate is 1.8 compared to the 2.1 constant population level. But numbers much below that do alarm many.

People are replying that it'll lead to uncontrolled population collapse, and it'll disproportionately affect the poor. But the alternative is to keep growing the population until we run into a much harder problem to solve (water, food, climate) and then collapse. And won't that disproportionately affect the poor? And won't it be much worse, because the population will be much larger then?

Our entire social contract relies on the a redistribution of wealth from young to old. Boomer Communism, it's currently called.

If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.

If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?

>What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon,

Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.

And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.

Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.

>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.

This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.

Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.

That's the same question I have as well. We're a cancer that's spreading on the earth and we're worrying we aren't spreading fast enough. Yeah, I get that we want to support the aging population, but at this point we're doing it at the expense of humanity as a whole.