This strikes me as very naive. Birthrates have been declining for a few decades (in some countries) and you’re trying to extrapolate this trend out into the distant future. Meanwhile there are already developed countries that buck this trend. Qatar is richer than any European country, and Qataris have 4 kids per woman. Imagine you had a petri dish of bacteria, and introduce a chemical that stops reproduction of 98% of the types of bacteria inside it, 2% of the bacteria have resistance to this chemical. What you would see is a period of slowing growth, as most of the bacteria stop reproducing. Then there would be a period of decline in the bacteria population, as the non-reproducing bacteria start dying off. Finally, there would be a return to exponential growth, as the 2% fill the petri dish left empty by the sterilized bacteria.
All that is necessary is for a small percentage to be immune and to be able to pass their immunity to their children with some consistency.
Well, Qatar’s birthrate is in a decline, too. But that’s beside the point, since I don’t actually disagree with you. Both your comment and mwengler’s reply strike me as arguing a different point from what I was making in the essay.
I was primarily trying to say that life extension won’t cause an immediate economic disaster—that yes, although it will impact global demographics, it will take many decades (maybe centuries) for the impact of those changes to propagate through society, which is plenty of time for our economy to adjust. Dealing with gradual change isn’t a problem, dealing with sudden and unanticipated shocks is. We’ve successfully dealt with many such gradual changes before.
In contrast, you two seem to be making the Malthusian argument that in the long term, any population will expand until it reaches the maximum capacity of the environment and each individual makes no more than a subsistence living. And I agree with that, but that has little to do with life extension, since the very same logic would apply regardless of whether life extension was ever invented. Yes, life extension may have the effect that we’ll hit population and resource limits faster, but we’d eventually run into them anyway. The main question is whether life extension would accelerate the expansion towards Malthusian limits enough to make the transition period much more painful than what it would otherwise be, and whether that added pain would outweigh the massive reductions in human suffering that age-related decline causes—and I don’t see a reason to presume that it would.
Well, Qatar’s birthrate is in a decline, too. But that’s beside the point, since I don’t actually disagree with you. Both your comment and mwengler’s reply strike me as arguing a different point from what I was making in the essay.
I know this is tangential, but I want to point out why the statistic you used is deceptive. Qatar has a huge foreign population (80% of the population) with much lower birthrates than the native Qataris. Four kids/ woman for Qataris, and 2 kids / woman for resident foreigners. So the decline in birth rates is mainly caused by 2 factors related to immigration. The first is that the resident foreigners have relatively fewer women (most migrant workers are males) and therefore lower the “births per 10,000”. Second, the women that do immigrate in have far lower birth rates than Qataris.
The more important element here that I disagree with is this:
If some people wish to have lots of children and are willing to endure having an otherwise lower standard of living because of that, that’s fine by me.
There are externalities here. When people make lots of kids, it doesn’t just crowd out resources for their parents. It crowds them out for everybody. At some point, more kids means higher prices (or, in a command economy, smaller rations) for everyone else. I am somewhat sympathetic to the Hansonian sentiment that having a huge number of poor people is better than having a tiny number of idle gods, and that poor people can be happy.
But I do flinch away from the idea that human-level minds should be like dandelion seeds for profligate, reproduction-obsessed future ems.
I know this is tangential, but I want to point out why the statistic you used is deceptive.
Ah. Thanks for the correction.
At some point, more kids means higher prices (or, in a command economy, smaller rations) for everyone else.
At some point in the far future, yes. But for now, more kids are AFAIK considered to have positive externalities, and barring uploading or the Singularity that looks to be the case for at least a couple of hundred years.
(Of course, discussing developments a couple of hundred years in the future while making the assumption that we’ll remain as basically biological seems kinda silly, but there you have it.)
This strikes me as very naive. Birthrates have been declining for a few decades (in some countries) and you’re trying to extrapolate this trend out into the distant future. Meanwhile there are already developed countries that buck this trend. Qatar is richer than any European country, and Qataris have 4 kids per woman. Imagine you had a petri dish of bacteria, and introduce a chemical that stops reproduction of 98% of the types of bacteria inside it, 2% of the bacteria have resistance to this chemical. What you would see is a period of slowing growth, as most of the bacteria stop reproducing. Then there would be a period of decline in the bacteria population, as the non-reproducing bacteria start dying off. Finally, there would be a return to exponential growth, as the 2% fill the petri dish left empty by the sterilized bacteria.
All that is necessary is for a small percentage to be immune and to be able to pass their immunity to their children with some consistency.
Well, Qatar’s birthrate is in a decline, too. But that’s beside the point, since I don’t actually disagree with you. Both your comment and mwengler’s reply strike me as arguing a different point from what I was making in the essay.
I was primarily trying to say that life extension won’t cause an immediate economic disaster—that yes, although it will impact global demographics, it will take many decades (maybe centuries) for the impact of those changes to propagate through society, which is plenty of time for our economy to adjust. Dealing with gradual change isn’t a problem, dealing with sudden and unanticipated shocks is. We’ve successfully dealt with many such gradual changes before.
In contrast, you two seem to be making the Malthusian argument that in the long term, any population will expand until it reaches the maximum capacity of the environment and each individual makes no more than a subsistence living. And I agree with that, but that has little to do with life extension, since the very same logic would apply regardless of whether life extension was ever invented. Yes, life extension may have the effect that we’ll hit population and resource limits faster, but we’d eventually run into them anyway. The main question is whether life extension would accelerate the expansion towards Malthusian limits enough to make the transition period much more painful than what it would otherwise be, and whether that added pain would outweigh the massive reductions in human suffering that age-related decline causes—and I don’t see a reason to presume that it would.
I know this is tangential, but I want to point out why the statistic you used is deceptive. Qatar has a huge foreign population (80% of the population) with much lower birthrates than the native Qataris. Four kids/ woman for Qataris, and 2 kids / woman for resident foreigners. So the decline in birth rates is mainly caused by 2 factors related to immigration. The first is that the resident foreigners have relatively fewer women (most migrant workers are males) and therefore lower the “births per 10,000”. Second, the women that do immigrate in have far lower birth rates than Qataris.
The more important element here that I disagree with is this:
There are externalities here. When people make lots of kids, it doesn’t just crowd out resources for their parents. It crowds them out for everybody. At some point, more kids means higher prices (or, in a command economy, smaller rations) for everyone else. I am somewhat sympathetic to the Hansonian sentiment that having a huge number of poor people is better than having a tiny number of idle gods, and that poor people can be happy.
But I do flinch away from the idea that human-level minds should be like dandelion seeds for profligate, reproduction-obsessed future ems.
Ah. Thanks for the correction.
At some point in the far future, yes. But for now, more kids are AFAIK considered to have positive externalities, and barring uploading or the Singularity that looks to be the case for at least a couple of hundred years.
(Of course, discussing developments a couple of hundred years in the future while making the assumption that we’ll remain as basically biological seems kinda silly, but there you have it.)