Ask A Genius 939: Population Decline Now

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/11

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: A few weeks ago, I read about rapidly changing estimates of the maximum human population, the peak human population, at which point we’ll have the most humans ever, and then the total human population will subsequently decline. The estimate has been revised from about 10.8 billion in the year 2100 to 2061, with a peak of 9.5 billion people, based on people making fewer babies. Among other reasons for people making fewer babies is that life is so distracting and entertaining that people are having less sex and coupling up less. Coupling is hard, and being entertained is easy. You don’t have to try as hard.

Instead of trying to attract a mate, you can be your crappy slob self, play video games, watch porn, consume hundreds of streaming entertainment options, and be sufficiently content that you don’t try to couple up. I’ve run this by a few people, including you. Everyone said it’s obvious. Everyone seems to agree that this is a major factor in people not having as much sex as people who are otherwise occupied.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You mentioned a factor. Those seem like multiple factors. How would you rank them?

Rosner: I’d say this is in at least the top three and probably the major factor. The more westernized a country is, the moreits population is in decline. The last continent in 2075 to have an increasing population is predicted to be Africa. I’d saydistraction and other forms of satisfaction are the number one factor. Another major factor is that it’s expensive to have the means to couple up. You can be more successful at coupling if you’re not living in your parent’s basement or a crappy studio apartment without a car. At least in America and probably around the world, older people have most of the money. People 45 and older have 94% of the privately held assets in America. So if you’re poor…

It’s hard to look cool enough to attract a mate, and it’s hard to pay for having a kid. Another factor might be optimism about living a long time. But older people have most of the money.

If you think you’re going to live to a hundred, maybe you don’t want to give away your money to your younger relatives. It used to be that you left a legacy by having kids and passing your money on to them. Now, you leave a legacy of yourself by not dying. But I’m not sure that’s a major factor. Another minor factor might be increasing equality for women, which means that kids may be put off. You wait till later, or maybe decide not to have them at all. And if you’ve got a good job, you might not have to depend on attracting a mate. Traditionally, the man has the job, and the woman is the homemaker and the babymaker. What do you think?

Jacobsen: There’s some truth to it. There are factors. There’s truth to it. One of the biggest changes has been the technology to be able to actualize these choices. It’s not simply social changes like a more lenient populace towards women’s roles or the change in policy and politics. So, policy and political changes around women in the workplace, equal pay, anti-discrimination laws, and better representation in political positions change those more rapidly.

Rosner: It used to be that jobs paid enough that a family could survive off of just one parent being employed. Now, there are fewer of those jobs and more jobs where both parents need to be employed, which also puts a damper on having kids. Less time and less energy.

Jacobsen: Another big factor is the legal and policy stuff. Another change following the legal and policy changes and the social changes is the massive technological changes that can actualize those policies and political changes. Things like the pill, copper IUDs, etc., allow people to make systematic choices about planning their lives, whether or not they want to have kids at all. And those are relatively new. People used to have quite a few rough decisions and recommendations, but chemical intervention is the way to go. Hormone intervention is the way to go. You can have authoritarian governments like China and Russia and democratic governments like South Korea and Japan, all having the same problem. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the political system, wealth of the country, or freedoms. It seems to have more to do with how women are ultimately making choices in their individual lives. Women are making choices not to have kids.

Rosner: So authoritarian governments are unsustainable in their way.

Jacobsen: I would say sexist authoritarian and sexist democratic societies are unsustainable. used on the choices women are making for their lives, looking at the population numbers in terms of growth rates… It doesn’t matter whether it’s democratic or authoritarian. The populations are declining. So, it doesn’t have to do with political institutions or the style of governance.

Rosner: It may have to do with religion, though. Catholics and Muslims are expected to have a lot of kids, and as religion gets hollowed out, maybe there’s less of a mandate. Also, a minor factor is a pessimism about the future. But why would you want to have a kid in this world? Do you think that’s a major factor?

Jacobsen: It’s a movement, but it’s not a big movement. It only tends to happen in societies with more time and freedom on their hands, and those tend to be left-wing. So, if you’re looking at left-wing and wealthier societies with women making those arguments, you’re talking about a minority within a minority within a minority. It’s not a big issue, I think.

Rosner: Alright, so we hit all the possible reasons. Another possible reason that I think is minor is decreasing fertility. They say that men’s testosterone levels have been decreasing. I don’t think that’s a major cause, though it might be a minor cause. If you’re making crap sperm that can’t make a baby, and if you’ve got lower testosterone, that makes you less horny. Looking at it as a minor issue, but a moderate issue if you consider the age at which men and women are having kids is going up. If you have lower-quality eggs and sperm, then there’s an argument to be made that people will have fewer kids and a smaller window to have kids, and some people who want kids may end up having none because they can’t. The standard sitcom family is Homer and Marge Simpson, where the dad is a buffoon, and the wife quietly keeps the family running. People may be disenchanted and don’t see an advantage in living like that. So, anyway, there are multiple possible causes that all seem plausible and work together. A lot of them are cultural and social, and then you have a couple of suspects that might be biological. What surprises me when I talk to people about this is that everyone agrees and is ready to believe it. Usually, when you push against the status quo, which I would think families and having babies are, you get a lot of pushback and denial. But with this, I haven’t told it to many people.

Among the people I’ve told, everyone agrees, which surprises me. Do you think these kinds of narratives deter men or women more? I ran it by Carol, and she agreed. I’ve discussed it on pod TV, and it comes up in discussions there. Nobody says they don’t believe it. Everyone cites statistics. The US is making babies well under the replacement rate. One of the guys I’ve talked to about this is the former Comptroller General of the United States. He’s a numbers guy and says everyone seems to know we’re not replacing the population. I don’t know. Elon Musk is part of this. Mostly right-wingers, and Musk is a right-winger now, say people need to have more babies. I understand the argument that a growing population equals economic growth. We’re used to having an increasing population, making more workers and consumers. The right-wingers defend the status quo and want that to continue, calling you a commie if you’re not in favour of it.

I think it’s possible to have a strong economy with a stable or declining population. We need to figure out what that would look like. It would require more automation to take care of the elderly. Places like Japan don’t have enough young people to take care of the elderly, so they need robots to help. As we move into the robot era, that’s one way to manage a declining population. That’s all I have. Thoughts on your religious point?

Jacobsen: Can this be exemplified by the differences between Orthodox and Reform Judaism?

Rosner: Orthodox Jews are encouraged to have sex on the Sabbath and are supposed to have a healthy sex life. I don’t know that there’s a mandate to have a lot of kids, but Orthodox Jews do tend to have big families.

Jacobsen: What is the future of sustainable population growth? The only populations that are close to the 2.1 replacement rate are industrialized, egalitarian societies, with around 1.5 to 1.8. What would bring those up to 2.1?

Rosner: Economic incentives could affect population trends. In China, couples were only allowed to have one kid for decades, but that’s gone away because China’s population has stabilized. In the US, we’ve had incentives for couples, such as the mortgage interest deduction, which favours families. It’s easier to buy a house if you’re a family. Deducting the costs of your mortgage interest from your income is a considerable help because mortgage interest might be a family’s biggest expense.

Jacobsen: That is social engineering.

Rosner: Other things you could do to increase the population include more deductions per kid and programs that pay for higher education. We’ve got a college debt crisis in the US, where people owe more than a hundred grand and can’t pay it down because the lenders are predatory. That might scare people away from having kids because they can’t see how they would finance their kids’ education. The government can offer ways to make having kids cheaper.

Jacobsen: If we’re worried about making more babies, we should make attracting a mate part of the family.

Rosner: Our educational curriculum. We used to have Home Economics, which taught people how to be homemakers. There used to be more emphasis on sports, such as football, in the golden age of American high schools. Being a jock was a good way to attract a mate. It wasn’t part of the curriculum, but it was part of the social structure of high school. That has been eroding. We could have explicit programs in high schools that teach people how to adjust their expectations and be less gross and selfish. Social media and reality shows have made us more selfish and more self-satisfied, with unrealistic expectations about the partners we can attract. We could come up with educational programs to improve people and make them okay with coupling up with those on their level. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. The conditions under which something like that might happen are if the US becomes more like “The Handmaid’s Tale” if the right wing wins enough elections. You don’t want a US where we’re coerced into making more babies because that would mean the fundamentalist right wing has won. The end, maybe.

Jacobsen: My general perspective is that sustainable growth has to do with egalitarian, freer, wealthy societies with lots of freedoms for women and then some unknown empirical tweaks to bump that up by 0.5 or 0.8, or whatever it is.

Rosner: If you want to bump it up, you have to make it easier for people to have kids. You have to look at each dimension of having kids. One is being able to afford kids. Another is being able to tolerate kids. Being able to tolerate possible mates and making yourself tolerable. Some of those things could happen, but I think there are enough trends against those things happening that we’ll continue to see declining birth rates, especially if medicine adds 10, 15 or 20 years of healthy life to the average human lifespan. If you’re going to keep living, you may want to keep your resources to yourself, which may discourage a significant portion of the population from having kids. If you’re not going to die, you may not want to have kids. If dying is inevitable, and the average lifespan in your nation is like 65, you can’t take it with you. You might as well have kids to pass on any accumulated wealth.

Jacobsen: The trends are for people to have fewer and fewer kids per capita.

Rosner: The end?

Jacobsen: The end. Do you want to talk tomorrow?

Rosner: Yeah, I’ll talk tomorrow.

Jacobsen: Alright, talk to you then. Thank you.

[Recording End]

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