Ask A Genius 933: Population Dynamics and Energy Consumption

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/05/10

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: Okay, we will discuss population dynamics and energy consumption.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you want to start with population or energy?

Rosner: Well, I am just going to start with how I came upon it. I just read an article that people have been saying for a while because it’s true that a quarter of the world’s nations have shrinking populations. Today, I saw that by 2080, three-quarters of the world’s nations will have shrinking populations, with every continent except Africa experiencing declining populations. Demographics experts keep revising forward when Earth will achieve peak population. They used to say 11 billion by the year 2100, then it was 10 point something billion in 2080, and according to this most recent article, we’relooking at a peak population of 9.5 billion around 2061. So what’s going on?

Jacobsen: So people are having fewer babies per capita. Why?

Rosner: Various people will say different things, depending on their agenda. In developed countries, people might be despairing about the future. The U.S. has pretty high suicide rates, and that probably goes along with if you don’t want yourself to live; you don’t want to bring other people into the world. Also, people are putting off having kids because people live longer and are healthier longer. In the olden days, in my mom’s generation, on average in America, women had their last kid at age 26. Things moved faster; people got married earlier. Things are more stretched out through our lifespans now, and there’s more stuff to do besides hook up. I think one reason that people have less sex is that there are other forms of entertainment.

Jacobsen: What are the most prominent forms of entertainment slowing this down?

Rosner: Well, in the 70s, when I was a kid, there was not much entertainment. Three networks. The T.V. sucked. There were some great movies, but you could only go to so many movies. Now you can stay home and watch endless stuff like video games; the industry is more significant than T.V. or movies. There’s pornography, and if people can get sexual satisfaction without having to go to the trouble of making themselves presentable to the opposite sex, they may give up on hooking up. It’s the incel thing. Involuntary celibates. Guys who have just given up on trying to get girlfriends.

Jacobsen: The term involuntary is a misnomer because they have made the choice. They think, “I suck,” or “women suck,” or whatever. Guys can go either way or both ways in terms of whether they get down on themselves or down on women, but in any case, the upshot is that they quit trying and withdraw themselves from the reproductive market. Now, is this permanent, or do you think it’s temporary?

Rosner: For most cases, it might be permanent. Also, there are economic pressures because, until the 80s, each generation did better than the previous generations in America. We know that middle-class income has been, at best, flat, adjusted for inflation for the past 50 years. Yeah, we don’t have rising incomes. That’s another discouraging factor if youcan’t afford a nice place to live or build a life with somebody, which reduces reproduction.

Jacobsen: There are well-established, well-known factors in declining birth rates, and the most notable might be that in developing countries with high infant mortality, people have more kids because many of their kids die before reaching adulthood, and they want to have some kids who survive. So, if you live in a poor country with bad conditions, you might have four, five, or six kids and expect two or three to live to adulthood.

Rosner: This might reflect the low reproduction and high investment in more well-off societies.

Jacobsen: Yeah, also, people are more selfish now. They may not want to share their lives with a ton of kids. This house was built in 1966 during the Brady Bunch era — five tiny bedrooms. The idea was that a family with four or five kids would move here, and everybody would live in tight circumstances. People don’t want to live like that anymore in America. Maybe some people do. There are some movements where they’re pushed, including by Elon Musk, who says we have to have more babies. But there was the entire quiver movement of about ten years ago that said you want to make a ton of babies for Jesus, so there are more white Christians than other people, just like looking at reproduction as a demographic race war kind of nonsense.

Rosner: Quiverful is a Christian theological position that sees large families as a blessing from God. It encourages procreation, abstaining from all forms of birth control, natural family planning, and sterilization reversal. That’s from Wikipedia. The movement derives its name from Psalm 127, 3 to 5, where many children are metaphorically referred to as arrows in a full quiver;. However, a bow with arrows is typically seen as an object of war, it might be part of the culture.

Jacobsen: Well, I’m sure this quiverful thing, to the extent that it exists today, and it probably does, probably goes hand in hand with many other creepy agendas. So, we’re talking about statistics, the facts, and the figures.

Rosner: Yeah, so people are having fewer babies. It might be because they’re…

Jacobsen: Well, people are having fewer babies. There are reasons why. There are statistical trends.

Rosner: What about the non-tangible moralisms people throw around? People aren’t growing up anymore, and people are entitled, so they don’t want to share their lives with more kids and things like that. What do you think of those objections to these trends? Or justifications for these trends?

Jacobsen: No, those would be objections to these trends.

Rosner: Oh, you mean curmudgeons saying, “Forget you people, you’re not having enough babies. You’re being selfish”?

Jacobsen: So you could have some from the quiverful movement saying, “You aren’t having enough children. That is selfish.” A white Christian is saying this to other white people. Individuals can say, “Look at how people started families earlier and then built a life together, rather than building a life and then getting together.” Then the moralism being, “You’re not growing up.”

Rosner: So, there are lots of possible reasons, and I’m sure people are studying them, but the upshot is that people all over the world are having fewer babies per capita. The replacement rate is about 2.3 kids per woman, right? Because guys can’thave babies, the women have to have all the babies. They need to, if you look at it as people coupling up, every woman in a couple, with every person being coupled up, has to make at least two babies to replace them after they die.

Jacobsen: What if a woman thinks, “I’ll replace myself but not my husband”?

Rosner: Well, in any case, the U.S. currently has a per capita, per woman baby rate of 1.6, which is at least 20% below the replacement rate. This seems to be a pretty durable trend. You could say that the anti-abortion people, well, they’restrict; you don’t hear sophisticated arguments from the pro-life people. They’re just saying that as soon as the egg hits the sperm, that is a human that can’t be killed. They’re pretty absolute about that.

Jacobsen: But there is a more sophisticated argument that says we should limit abortion so people are forced to have more babies to keep our population up. I think that’s also a garbage argument, but Elon Musk, as I said, and other lunatics are saying we have to keep populations growing. And there is an argument to be made for that. As they’re currently understood and run, economies benefit from population growth: more consumers and workers.

Rosner: But we’ll have to figure out how to make economies that work with declining populations. I mean, it’s a problem.In some places, it’s been going on longer than in other areas, like Japan, which has a ton of older adults relative to retired people who often need medical care and nursing care, compared to young people. In a growing population, you’d have more young people to do payroll deductions, support social security, and work in nursing homes. When social security was created in the U.S., the average lifespan after retirement was just a few years. The average lifespan was low, under 65, maybe barely 65. So, many people didn’t even get to the age where they could claim social security benefits. And a ton of people were working, contributing to social security. Three, four, and five people were working for retired people and drawing social security. In Japan, that’s upside down. There aren’t enough people to care for all older people who need care, and there’s not enough money to care for them. Japan has been trying to automate senior care, and we will see some of that.

Jacobsen: But anyway, the general principle is we will have to figure out how to make economies run with a declining population. It doesn’t seem impossible, especially with technology replacing much labour with automation.

Rosner: And then there’s one more thing to discuss, which is, I looked at a chart of per capita carbon footprint in America, historically, and since 1970, the amount of energy used by each American has declined by 40 percent, which makes sense because, growing up, my family drove a Vista Cruiser station wagon, a massive boat of a car that got nine miles per gallon. Now, I’d say the average U.S. car gets upwards of 25 miles a gallon. Legislation will require the average miles per gallon across all American cars to increase above 30 miles per gallon by 2030. So we’re burning less in our cars, and many other things are more energy efficient. Some of that is market-driven, and some of it is government-directed. If per capita energy consumption drops by about one percent a year, and the population drops under a one percent increase per year within the next 15 years, which is what we’re looking at, because we’re going to go to zero percent increases in world population by 2061. Then we’ll go negative, even without extreme intervention to stop climate change; due to existing trends, the overall energy consumption on Earth might peak in the early 2050s.

Jacobsen: What about that trend? So, is the trend of extrapolation going from 2100 to 2080 to 2061?

Rosner: Yeah, I feel like, in the future, it will probably be sooner than 2061. It can’t be any sooner than 2025 because we live in 2024, so there’s a limit to how much closer it can get. But I could see that number going from a peak population of 9.5 billion in 2061 to, no, we’ve revised it, and people are making even fewer babies than we thought. We’re going to say 9.3 billion, 9.2 billion in 2057.

Jacobsen: What about the general trend of women being more educated and empowered? Typically, the more rights women have implemented, the slower the population grows. They have economic independence and education; they don’thave to depend on men regarding their income. There are trends along that as well, where you see a rise in IVF pregnancies at about the age of 40, where these women traditionally would be having their children in their 20s, maybe their 30s.

Rosner: Yeah.

Jacobsen: So how does that play into this general trend?

Rosner: Well, in general, you’re talking about empowerment via education for women.

Jacobsen: And employment.

Rosner: And employment. But at universities across America, and I guess the world, you’re the expert on this; women by far outnumber men.

Jacobsen: Most of the developed countries, yes.

Rosner: In most areas. Sometimes it’s like 60–40. Three women in a university for every man. So that’s positive empowerment. There’s also negative empowerment via social media. Social media makes you selfish because you get a personalized information feed 24–7. When you’re caught up in your world of a personal bubble of information, that may work against people coupling up and may raise people’s expectations. The autism rate has gone from no autistic people because we didn’t even know about autism.

Jacobsen: Do you think you’re on the spectrum?

Rosner: Yeah. But I missed the diagnosis when I was a kid.

Jacobsen: How far do you think you’re on the spectrum?

Rosner: Not that far. But possibly further, at certain times in my life, because I worked in bars for 25 years, greeting people is a social skill.

Jacobsen: It’s a very superficial social skill.

Rosner: Yeah, but still, that’s how a lot of autistic people who are socially fluid manage. They learn superficial social skills. I met the mayor of Burbank who identifies as autistic, and I’m like, dude, how do you manage? You seem pretty gregarious. And he says it’s all fake. It’s all mirroring. And I go home, and I’m reticent. In a given day, superficial, brief social interactions will be 90% of your interactions. Greeting people in bars takes care of a lot of it. Also, working in a writer’s room for a dozen years that’s like being in a rock tumbler. You’re going to get many edges knocked off. I’m still not as fluid as people who have inverse autism, people who are too socially fluid — the super schmoozy people in Hollywood.

Jacobsen: Knowing what to say and when to say it.

Rosner: Yeah, to the extent, I mean, because autistic people have social problems. People who have the opposite of autism have different social issues, like being sexual predators. And I have known people like that.

Jacobsen: I hypothesize that autism spectrum disorders and the like are a failure of a complete formation of a self.

Rosner: Yeah, not having autism is like the icing on the cake. You build all the layers and chunks, and then the social fluidity is like blending all these so that you can work fluidly in society. That’s one of the most demanding mental tasks you can have, which is understanding human interactions. If a glitch doesn’t form, you have a full spectrum of emotions, but you’re not implementing them effectively around other people. Autism has gone from not even a thing we knew existed to one kid in 166, and I think currently, more than one kid out of 100 is on the spectrum. You could also argue that not only is there increased awareness, but everybody being in their personal information bubble works against developing social fluidity.

Jacobsen: There is a colleague I know who is a neuroscientist. We were talking about autism spectrum disorders, and she commented that if you look at the neurons themselves in people who have these disorders, they look exactly like immature brain cells. So, the brain cells in people with these disorders have not matured. So, this is a structural and microstructural analog to what we see in behaviour.

Rosner: So that makes sense because what you see in a brain that’s maturing is the die-off of dendrites by the trillions, quadrillions, I don’t know. A baby is born with a highly wired-brain, right? Then, as the baby acquires experience and learns how to decipher the world, the helpful brain pathways are reinforced, and the unhelpful connections die off. The dendrites die off. If that’s not happening, if you’re not making sense of the world, then you’re tripping balls in chaos because you’re too highly connected. I buy that argument. It may be why we see there are more ways for things to go wrong and for people to be dysfunctional regarding brain wiring than not. This may explain why there’s a myth that people on the spectrum are highly functional, have high I.Q., and have high intelligence. This is a myth because most are below average and dysfunctional. When you get the hyper-functional ones, they’re the exception.

Jacobsen: People also say that about autism, that it is a defect in sensory processing. If your brain hasn’t matured so that you can make sense of what your senses are telling you, that can be autism. The trend now is that people are more in their bubbles. More forces work against people coupling up and reproducing than there used to be. You could say that’s a sad thing, but you can also say that it may save the world. That same article, I think, no, a different article said that stabilizing and then declining population may get us one-quarter of the way to solving climate change.

Rosner: I would argue that just regular market forces making things more efficient plus regular government forces saying, “You got to make your cars cleaner,” will handle another massive chunk of it. Then, there are extraordinary trends that haven’t fully flowered yet. For example, we’re still in the early days of telecommuting, of people just staying home because you can and can still do your job. I’ve probably mentioned teledildonics way too much, which is a sex apparatus that appeals to the sense of touch. Porn is primarily visual and a little bit auditory, but people work on technology. It’s a widely used technology, this Fleshlight thing. I don’t know what percent of the population has it, but it’s a thing that looks like a flashlight, but it’s a silicon vagina that you use. That’s fundamental technology. High technology may make remote sexual interaction possible. You can have sex with somebody who’s not in the room with you via teledildonics.

Jacobsen: So that’s one thing, and high technology will make sex robots that are maybe less creepy, maybe more acceptable. They did a survey. I don’t know who they are, but 80% of guys said they would be okay with being with a sophisticated sex robot, somebody who could have reasonable conversations with them. That’s still, I don’t know, 20 years away, 15 years away, depending on how open-minded you are about your sex robots. But there are extraordinary trends that haven’t kicked in yet. The upshot of all this is that I’m more optimistic now, having read that article and looked at other articles about per capita energy consumption, that these trends may save us. But we’ve got a rough few decades ahead because even when humanity’s carbon or aggregate fuel consumption hits peak energy consumption, we’ll keep doing damage.

[Recording End]

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