They see their 90 neighbours holding out their hands expecting to be looked after, those who, during their youth, were richer, had more free time, and more individualistic political views. And they start to wonder: why should my children have to bear this incredible burden?
As a relatively old person and a relative anti-natalist, I say they shouldn’t. It’s not their doing.
Unfortunately I can’t offer them a good alternative. Even if they don’t support all those old people, they’re still burdened by a world full of those people’s misery.
I have to own all that. What you are saying is important. A fair amount of it is already baked in. Denying it would be delusion.
Yet if I don’t want the young to break themselves trying to feed the old, I also don’t want anybody obliged to be breeding stock for somebody else’s Grand Plan. Slavery is slavery, however either of those might be dressed up as “duty”. And “voluntary” can be a dangerously elastic word.
All this is, in small part, the doing of people who set up public pension plans that promised an endless future payment stream, relying on the assumption that there’d always be new members. That’s an insolvent system that can never be wound up: a Ponzi scheme. But no matter how much money some pension system had put aside, there’d only be so many people to actually do the work. Money can only move real wealth around, not magic it into being. At best money can lubricate economic realignments, let productive systems get set up… but it can’t do that if you’re forced to spend it all on consumption. Prices just go up.
… but another reason I dislike natalism is that it’s another Ponzi “solution”. If your system can’t handle population contraction, or at least stability, then your physical arrangemenent can’t be “wound up”. Growth just sets up a bigger failure when you hit some real, physical limit.[1]
Such limits really do exist, and we don’t actually know where they are. In fact, we don’t even know if we’ve already passed them. We may not be sustainable right now. The climate’s looking pretty rickety, and it’s not the only thing, and nobody really knows the end state. Even after they pass tipping points, things that big take a long time to hit their new equilibria. Decades, and not just one or two decades. People who say tech or lifestyle changes will fix any of that, or just brush it off to assume that any new equilibrium will be tolerable, seem to be relatively long on talk and relatively short on substance. It might be a more realistic assumption that a major transition would at least fix your demographic imbalance by killing all the old people… but the way would happen would be… unpleasant. And not completely restricted to the old.
Anyway, my hope, if not my faith, is in the robots. And maybe anti-aging. Seriously, the whole demographic thing, and, if we’re incredibly lucky, maybe even much of the environmental thing, may be moot in 20 years.
If nothing else, paperclips don’t have a lot of needs and don’t care much about the climate.
but another reason I dislike natalism is that it’s another Ponzi “solution”. If your system can’t handle population contraction, or at least stability, then your physical arrangemenent can’t be “wound up”
I think there’s a band of birthrates that a society can survive without trouble, and anything outside of that band will result in issues no matter how you organize things. If everyone suddenly had 15 kids, the education and childcare sectors would be overwhelmed. Likewise if everyone had 0.5, as after 20 years there’d be roughly the same demand for infrastructure but substantially fewer people to maintain it[1]. The expectation is that each generation replaces itself with its children, and that expansions and contractions occur slowly enough that they can be accommodated with raises and recruiting campaigns for the relevant professions.
This differs from a Ponzi scheme because a Ponzi scheme requires a larger base at each step, recruited from the same broader population, inevitably exhausting the supply of marks. Some lobbyists will demand a growing population, or use the lack of one as an excuse to import cheaper labor, but, realistically, we could sustain an exactly-replacement birthrate forever with no real consequences for the average person, and we could sustain a slightly sub-replacement birthrate for quite a bit longer than many expect. It’s just that we’re dealing with numbers like 1.1 instead of 1.9.
Even taking the callous option and playing Logan’s Run doesn’t save us, here. There’s no clean way to scale down our food, housing, and electricity production by a factor of 2 such that we produce and maintain half of those things with half the workers.
As a relatively old person and a relative anti-natalist, I say they shouldn’t. It’s not their doing.
Unfortunately I can’t offer them a good alternative. Even if they don’t support all those old people, they’re still burdened by a world full of those people’s misery.
I have to own all that. What you are saying is important. A fair amount of it is already baked in. Denying it would be delusion.
Yet if I don’t want the young to break themselves trying to feed the old, I also don’t want anybody obliged to be breeding stock for somebody else’s Grand Plan. Slavery is slavery, however either of those might be dressed up as “duty”. And “voluntary” can be a dangerously elastic word.
All this is, in small part, the doing of people who set up public pension plans that promised an endless future payment stream, relying on the assumption that there’d always be new members. That’s an insolvent system that can never be wound up: a Ponzi scheme. But no matter how much money some pension system had put aside, there’d only be so many people to actually do the work. Money can only move real wealth around, not magic it into being. At best money can lubricate economic realignments, let productive systems get set up… but it can’t do that if you’re forced to spend it all on consumption. Prices just go up.
… but another reason I dislike natalism is that it’s another Ponzi “solution”. If your system can’t handle population contraction, or at least stability, then your physical arrangemenent can’t be “wound up”. Growth just sets up a bigger failure when you hit some real, physical limit. [1]
Such limits really do exist, and we don’t actually know where they are. In fact, we don’t even know if we’ve already passed them. We may not be sustainable right now. The climate’s looking pretty rickety, and it’s not the only thing, and nobody really knows the end state. Even after they pass tipping points, things that big take a long time to hit their new equilibria. Decades, and not just one or two decades. People who say tech or lifestyle changes will fix any of that, or just brush it off to assume that any new equilibrium will be tolerable, seem to be relatively long on talk and relatively short on substance. It might be a more realistic assumption that a major transition would at least fix your demographic imbalance by killing all the old people… but the way would happen would be… unpleasant. And not completely restricted to the old.
Anyway, my hope, if not my faith, is in the robots. And maybe anti-aging. Seriously, the whole demographic thing, and, if we’re incredibly lucky, maybe even much of the environmental thing, may be moot in 20 years.
If nothing else, paperclips don’t have a lot of needs and don’t care much about the climate.
Not that anybody seems to know how to get stability or sustainability either.
I think there’s a band of birthrates that a society can survive without trouble, and anything outside of that band will result in issues no matter how you organize things. If everyone suddenly had 15 kids, the education and childcare sectors would be overwhelmed. Likewise if everyone had 0.5, as after 20 years there’d be roughly the same demand for infrastructure but substantially fewer people to maintain it[1]. The expectation is that each generation replaces itself with its children, and that expansions and contractions occur slowly enough that they can be accommodated with raises and recruiting campaigns for the relevant professions.
This differs from a Ponzi scheme because a Ponzi scheme requires a larger base at each step, recruited from the same broader population, inevitably exhausting the supply of marks. Some lobbyists will demand a growing population, or use the lack of one as an excuse to import cheaper labor, but, realistically, we could sustain an exactly-replacement birthrate forever with no real consequences for the average person, and we could sustain a slightly sub-replacement birthrate for quite a bit longer than many expect. It’s just that we’re dealing with numbers like 1.1 instead of 1.9.
Even taking the callous option and playing Logan’s Run doesn’t save us, here. There’s no clean way to scale down our food, housing, and electricity production by a factor of 2 such that we produce and maintain half of those things with half the workers.