this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
65 points (95.8% liked)

Collapse

891 readers
32 users here now

This is the place for discussing the potential collapse of modern civilization and the environment.

Collapse, in this context, refers to the significant loss of an established level or complexity towards a much simpler state. It can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular, global event. Although, the longer the duration, the more it resembles a ‘decline’ instead of collapse.

RULES

1 - Remember the human

2 - Link posts should come from a reputable source

3 - All opinions are allowed but discussion must be in good faith.

4 - No low effort, high volume and low relevance posts.

Related lemmys:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
eleitl@lemm.ee
maketotaldestr0i@lemm.ee
eris@lemm.ee
65
There Are Many Threats to Humanity. A Low Birth Rate Isn’t One of Them. (www.currentaffairs.org)
submitted 1 month ago by JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world to c/collapse@lemm.ee
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This was published a couple of weeks ago, but not yet posted in this community.

It's a much-needed skewering of the idea that low birth rates are an existential crisis and that somehow what we need is more human beings on our stressed planet. This crazymaking meme is quickly becoming received wisdom. As the article describes, it's being propagated by a bunch of disparate thought leaders:

  • millenarianist billionnaires who are completely unexposed to our planet's ecological limits (Elon Musk, obviously)
  • pronatalist religious types, both conservative (Ross Douthat) and progressive (Elizabeth Bruenig)
  • liberals (Ezra Klein) and eccentric libertarians (Tyler Cowen) who apparently believe "abundance" is the only way to save democracy

Their talking points are pretty well recapitulated here. There's a legitimate argument to be had about the speed of any population decline (because of the stress on welfare systems). But the pronatalists are not talking about that, they're genuinely worried about human underpopulation. This article is full of stats and demonstrations that show that this concern is completely delusional and is helping to make our planet less liveable. We need to fight back by stating this fact more loudly.

[I]f 95 percent of today’s human beings were to evaporate overnight, we would still have a global population higher than 400 million. That’s more people than existed during Rome’s greatest territorial extent, a time after Homer, Herodotus, Pythagoras, Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Thucydides, Alexander, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Jesus, and many other important figures had all made their contributions to the Western world. This population level, which amounts to five percent or one-twentieth that of today (at most), was hardly a threat to civilization, and much less to the human species.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Nothing I linked to or said cast a political angle to any of this. It's just demographics and maths.

One solution is for a society to 100% defray the cost of raising children and take away the economic sting. South Korea and Japan are getting close, but it's not clear even that would work. Young people are waiting longer to get married, to start families, or to have more than two children (replacement ratio is 2.1).

Better healthcare in developed societies is also letting the elderly live longer. The flip side is that it also puts strains on national resources because it requires higher draws on pensions, use of socialized medicine, and limits real-estate turnover.

If you can't raise local birth rates, we're on a slow moving train crash to societal collapse. It's just a question of velocity. Once societies try all the soft incentives, they're left with hard choices:

They all have their issues. Time will tell which will work out.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

To say political and social choices are "just demographics and maths" is exactly how the neoliberals presented their own unsustainable recipes in the 1970s and 80s: "There Is No Alternative." As for "societal collapse", that is silly histrionics. Today's supposedly collapsing societies (Japan, Italy and so on) are, in material terms, some of the richest the world has ever known - far richer than they were themselves a few generations ago when orthodox economists were cheerleading for them. No, clearly they are not going to be pacemaking world GDP growth and consumption going forward - but do we not have the right to choose to move to other values? Most obviously: to work a few more years (not necessarily more hours) in line with longevity, to better distribute the existing abundance and above all to consume a bit less? I'm not a fan of the mental prison that underlies the choices you're presenting as inevitable.