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.
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.