7Is population decrease a problem? Yes.
What is it caused by? Wll there is a large list of possible causators, ‘blamants’ or culprits – if not outright conspirators. The list ranges from the effects of microplastics, workforce participation, capitalism, absurdly small apartments, the partiarchy, feminism urbanization, contraception, the rising cost of feminism, the jews, mass migration, liberals, LGBT, feminization, women,
There is a lot of far right, racist hand wringing about falling birth rates. I have always considered the whining about this problem a little creepy. What’s even more creepy are the proposed solutions from both the right as well as the left, from both the corporate as well as statists as solutions. To be realistic, low birth rates are secondary to the actual threats out there.
I agree that a world with a lot of old people and very few young people to take care of them will by and large be tragic for many of those old people. But if we are to make gross generalizations – those Boomers and Gen-X-ers (myself included) have by and large plucked the fruits of decades upon decades of unbridled post World War 2 growth, and now finally the chickens have come home to roost and because of some perfectly predictable and utterly algorithmic processes of lowering birh rates – that would have happened anyhow no matter what we would have done differently – and some of them might have to face to dying rotting in gangrenous bedsores and piss, ignored by understaffed care elder care clinics. Meanwhile, people in china jump to their deaths from factory buildings because their have to work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, and children as young as nine in the Congo are mining Coltrane. Boohoo much?
Yes I expressing myself intensely cruel, condescending here but let us look at the problem in a bigger context. The world sucks massively and for us in the developed world is hasn’t sucked to an almost paradisal degree and because have been to busy living on the hog to an almost sybaritic degree for since the 1960s (at least here in the Netherlands) now we start whining like bitches, the sky is faling because low birth rates? To these people I say, “what the fuck are you going on about?”
Question One – If there is a problem, what do you propose we do about it? Because quite often, raising a problem means you are kinda calling for a solution of some sort, or demanding an intervention of some sort. I mean, I can envision a bunch of solutions to raise the birth rate but I personally guarantee you they will all involve turning taxation into children OR turning women into breedmares. Do you propose such measures? Do you?
We have many problems. Climate change is a problem. Ths can be solved, but it will cost money. Say we can turn the sea into massive sinks for CO2 by introducing ‘illumination’ into major regions of the upper ocean. This will spur on massive algae blooms, which will in turn spur on industrialization of fish harvesting. It will take effort. We can literally green the Sahara. Likewise climate change will create sea level rise. That is a problem that can be solved, for instance by constructing large sea dams – there are for instance plans to dam of the North Sea. I personally have come to to regard this plan as increasingly rational. But again, the price tag is almost insane. Another problem everyone ignores is Phosphorous. In a decade or two we run out of global phosphorous, and the planetary industries and agricultures more or less shut down catastrophically. There are solutions to that, but these solutions, you guessed it, cost grotesque amounts of money, and almost titanic political will. In all of the above (and many other) examples we face problems where we either solve problems through war economy collective sacrifice, imposed authoritarian imposition of central technocratic will (fascism, anyone?) and investment of our collective freedoms. And then there are ofcourse the Bees.
Let me serve you the bad news. You and me reading this, sure here and there we might all think “we probably might agree to making a few sacrifices”. But this guy, and this guy, and this guy and this sociopath and let us not forget this piece of shit, … will consent to surrendering even a small fraction of their wealth, even if it means the planet burns to a crisp.
And here is where I come with good news.
Here is where I say not to worry. Yes, humanity faces a catastrophic collapse of birth rates. But something else is happening at the same time.
There are strong indicators that in the next few years we will see incremental advances in the treatment of aging. We don’t need much. Let me differentiate between several things here in terms of what we need, and how difficult each are – and the last one I will insist is by far the most difficult challenge ahead.
1. the treatment of tfhe effects of aging of governmental policies. Yes these will requiire interventions of governments that may currently be regarded by some as “petty” and “belittling”, such as – making consumption of certain ranges of products less accessible to almost impossible. I know a guy (i used to love the guy as father figure before he became a ravcing far right conspiracy lunatic boomer) who smokes like a chimney and who demands the right to do so. If we were to calculate the full medical impact costs of smoking for the individual a pack of cigarettes would have to cost 44.70 euro. In other words, if a pack of cigarettes costs LESS than that, a smoker in effect offloads the long-term cost of smoking onto other taxpayers. Try tell him that. I am saing that ‘the responsible state’ MUST soon come to constrain behavior in the individual – by force – that results in fiscally unaffordable costs. Yeah I know, this sounds at first glance incredibly petty and petulant and billigerent but it is part of the bigger picture of having a society that has a long term sustainability objective. It’s as simple as that.
2. we are very close a number of treatments of medicinal interventions where we can safely state that applying them on the population, voluntarily, will have a major positive impact. In effect, when it comes to Metformin, Naproxen, Statins, Aspirin, Rapamycin – and a range of relatively modest lifestyle and diet changes and you’ll see people on average live (a) years longer and (b) do so in significant better health and quality of life and (c) consume a fuck ton less collective societal resources.
3. There comes a point where science reaches point 3, and some people claim we are not far off that point. We are probably talking some kind of treatment every year, or a few times a year where you go to a clinic and you take a nap in a sterile room and you leave a little sniffly – but you feel stronger and younger and alive – and most markers for aging will read as reversed. You have a lighter step, your will be retuirning to sports, you will be going on vacations again, you will be more adventurous in bed, you will wake up and look at the rising sun and smile and realize “yeah, life is fun”. By stage three we can after the fact (probably decades after the fact) safely conclude people were in fact living five to ten years longer “on average” (sans the idiots that died engaging in wild and whacky adventures all of a sudden) and those ten years will make massive difference in terms of keeping society sustainable in terms of what goes in and what goes out. Or – in terms of how horrible YOUR life is in the last 10 years of your life, worst case scenario.
4. And now we go and say the very ambitious things. The human body is a very complex apparatus, but as we have seen, complex things have become increasingly and bewildleringly subject to control and adjustment and re-engineering. The goal we may set ourselves (emphasis may – this is a voluntary project) is to reverse aging and be young again. You don’t have to take up this challenge. You can voluntarily age, curl up and die somewhere peacefully. In the latter case society will (should, most, shall) accept the task of providing you with love, care, dignity as you age, wither and die. We weill honor your last years and we will honor your remains. But do not expect us to dwell upon the memory. Those that decide to accept his challenge will at some point succeed and will live substantially longer lives. These treatments are no longer speculative. They will likely be invasive and relatively costly and they will be accumulative anbd recurrent. At some point medical interventions will not longer suffice to allow th human ‘biological substrate’ to subsist past 150, 200, 250 years and by then we nay have to add maybe sections of the spine, or embed small parts of artificial neurology in the brain to help in processing the gradual accumulation of memories over the centuries. We have no idea yet, but we do not that at some point many peopke will passionately desire this, these people will be increasingly skilled to realize this, will have more and more time to make this time a reality, and will be granted unthinkable technology and masssive investments to realize this.
5. The biggest challenge. Disbelief. And this disbelief is no less in the old. I was in 2012 in Serbia where I was in the presence on stage with Aubrey deGrey and Bruce Sterling, facing a very young audience. The young audience was instinctively receptive. Comparatively a Dutch audience would be on average 10-20 years older and relatively more staid and conservative – and tends to instinctively respond with hostility towards these ideas. People in the life extension community label this “the Death Trance“, where the mere idea of life extension is experienced as so “too good to be true” that the conscious mind rejects this off hand, to the point of outright hostility. As I write these words I already realize that the words are simply useless to these audiences and that’s the emphasis of point five. To convince people that this is respectively – scientific, possible, worthwhile. “ethical”, sane, possible whatever is like trying to push a wet matress up a spiral staircase. It is an exercise in dumbfounded slackjawed confusion. It is a lot like Galileo trying to convince the pope to just look through the telescope at the moons around Jupiter and the Pope just flat out refusing it, because.
So, returning to the original argument – yes, if society persists in doing nothing, relying on incompetent, self-serving, boomer-old, corrupt politicians in rotting political systems, yeah we are pretty much screwed on climate change, biosphere depletion, resource depletion, treatment resistant infections, radicalization of our populations, income and wealth disparity world wide, dying bees. the pension crisis, the housing crisis, sea level rise, water scarcity, drone warfare, mass migration, russia, Netanyahu, microplastics, political disenfranchisement, technological disruption – and yes people not breeding enough.
IF however people have the expectation that they’d actually live longer (and not just as gangrenous depressed old people soaking in their excrement in a geriatric clinic), they would actually give a damn about the future. If you have the reasonable belief you might be living as a 30 year old in 2100 you are really really going to care about all of the above problems and make damn sure they get solved.