America’s incarceration rate is in decline

People keep poking at the wrong reasons, but in some societies it is quite dire. South Korea with this year of 1, when 2.1 means 'static', means more than halving the population every 30 years or so.

For a reverse comparison, if you take a penny and double it every day, you end up with > $5M in 30 days. And yet this birthrate issue doesn't take into account plague, war, natural disasters, and potential issues with lack of food(starvation). And the worst of it?

Is that I believe it is 100% environmental.

People think "having children" is a conscious choice. And sure, there is some of that. But at the same time, it is the very point of existence for an organism. Actually producing children (not just performing the sex act) is an evolutionary requirement. It is literally the primary drive of existence. Risky behaviour is ingrained into us, if it enables the possibility of reproduction. The drives and energy we place into everything we do, has a background drive that is sexual in nature. We seek to excel, to impress the opposite sex.

Like it or not (I'm not like that, I decide, not my hormones!), this is effectively an accepted fact of animal psychology. It's a part of who we are, our culture is designed around it, and every aspect of our lives is ruled by it.

Why am I on about this??

Well, my point is that this is a primary drive, interlaced so deeply that it affects every aspect of who we are. Reproduction, the production and raising of offspring is an act we are, naturally, compelled to. Forced to. Need to do.

Unless of course specific chemicals, maybe microplastics or all of the "forever chemicals" in our blood, are blocking that process.

Again, people will chime in with the popular "But it's expensive". No. Just no. Nope! My point above is that this is primal drive. People have had children in the depression, on purpose. Historically people, even with contraceptives, have had children regardless.

If it's about money, why is the birth rate declining in countries with free daycare, universal health care, and immensely strong support for parents post birth? Mandated career protection for mothers, months and months of time off after birth all paid. Immense tax breaks making children almost a profitable enterprise. In fact, in some European countries, it is more affordable to have kids than at any time in human history... and the birth rate still declines. It's just not about money. It just is not.

Why I think this is immensely important, is because we aren't seeing a rate, but an ongoing declining rate. The rate isn't just the lowest in human history, but the rate continues to decline. It's not '1' for South Korea, it's 1 right now, and will be 0.5 eventually.

What happens when no one can have children?

I further ask this, because the entire future of the species is at risk. People get all "who cares about going on", but wars do happen, plagues do happen, and I assure you I'm happy to be here, regardless of what the survivors of the bubonic plague thought at the time. Yet if we see a plague that kills 1/2 the population, where does that leave this equation? And what happens if we see a war that kills mostly those of child bearing age? What then?

My secondary concern in all of this is, we have very specialized roles these days. There was a time where a person could be a "a physicist", yet now there are 1000s of sub-specialties in such fields. And not everyone in the population is capable of expanding science. Of discovering 'new'.

My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress. There simply will not be enough people intelligent in a way functional to, say, physics, to expand that field.

So if our population decreases too far, we may not be able to resolve issues with, say, forever chemicals. Or with microplastics. Our capacity to do research and resolve such issues may vanish.

Couple that with a graph that is constantly declining, and a simple 50% death rate in a plague, could mean the extinction of the human race.

So my real concern here is, we aren't swinging the pendulum on purpose. It's happening to us. We're in the middle of an extinction event.

And it's only going to get far, far worse.

You don't just shrug that off and say "oh well, it'll probably be just fine."

More people are alive today than have ever lived.

And you are concerned that the population will drop by a half?

Everyone will be richer and better off. The amount of pollution and resource use will be solved too. The underlying input to that is the number of people.

One third of arable land is undergoing desertification

Insects and other species are dying off precipitously

Corals and kelp forests too, entire ecosystems. Overfishing etc.

My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress.

That’s silly when AI can already make 1 person do the job of 100, and soon will be doing most of the science — it has already done this for protein folding etc. And it will happen sooner than in 30 years.

This argument you and Musk make about needing more humans for science is super strange. Because you know the AI will make everything 100x anyway. And anyway, I would rather have the current level of science than ecosystem collapse across the board.

Also appeals to evolution are extremely weak and lazy and unproven.

What on earth am I reading?

If you read more carefully, I am concerned by two things. A reduction to 0, and the lack of control over this. I think you don't get how the rate is continuing to decline, and further, that knowing why is important.

And I have not said we need "more humans". Instead, I said we need a base number of humans.

Yet the first is aggression often born from, again, reproductive drive. You don't see moose smashing the horns together for fun, they do it to exhibit dominance. All creatures strive to say "I'm the best!", in hundreds of subtle and overt ways. "Success" at any act means "I'm a better mate!".

All of human culture, all of human drive, all of our existence is laced, entwined, and coupled with this drive. You may think your fancy pants brain is the ruler of all, but it's not, for the very way you think, is predicated by an enormous amount of physiological drives, the primary being "reproduce".

Saying that "citing concepts from entire branch of science" is weak, is a very weird thing to do.

There's a tendency for people in developed (particularly western) countries to feel entitled to immigrants. It's weird to think you'll not only have people changing your diapers when you're 90, but that your country should actively bring in people and deprive poorer countries of similar care, then leave those poor working class immigrants to fend for themselves once they're old.

It's the same mindset that drove society since the 1950s: it makes my life convenient, who cares if it makes life harder for people far from me or after I'm dead? And now we're all living with the accumulated consequences of all that (depleted ozone, climate change, ocean acidification, microplastics, oceans stripped of life, teflon pollution, deforestation, CO2 rising rapidly).

The world needs better solutions.

That's basically the same solution as dumping toxic waste overseas: you're just shifting the problem (depopulation) to someplace poorer and probably less able to deal with it.

Birthrates are declining everywhere, and the current global fertility rate is at replacement (so don't expect it to stay that high). In the future, there's going to be no magical place from which you can "import" all the people you need, because you chose not to make them yourself.

That's not a fantasy, it's the inevitable outcome of sub-replacement fertility, which is the state we find ourselves in (though my intuition says it will take longer than "a couple of centuries" to get to zero).

Why? Why are we sure that the population will not settle? Or that our increased productivity won't offset a change in labor?

I do worry societies will fail to handle side effects like the temporary increased demand for elder care, but no real fear of total societal collapse.

The US is unique (or maybe there are a handful of others, I don't know) in its ability to welcome immigrants who, within two generations, largely see themselves as Americans first and not as the identity of their grandparents. American identity politics has eroded this somewhat but it is still largely true, for example, that grandchildren of immigrants will usually have a very poor grasp of their grandparents' native languages.

The US alone doubled it's population since the 1950s. Enough scaremongering.

In 30 years time, people might be uploading their consciousness to computers, or colonising the moon. Making dire warnings about a concept like breeding that we might just get rid of seems foolish at best.

>We're in the middle of an extinction event.

No we are not. Lmao. Same way Horse Manure didnt snuff out life in London.

I think you need to drop back to reality to reassess your concerns. Barring a major disaster, there is no risk of extinction. Population decline is a factor only in economic terms, as demographics alone will require a significant chunk of a nation's productivity potential to sustain people who left the workforce. However, countries like the US saw it's population double in only two or three generations, and people in the 50s weren't exactly fending off extinction.

That sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie.

Assuming you meant died instead of lived to avoid a potentially nonsensical reading, this is not true.

It seems this factoid[0] has been around since the 1970s, and at least in 2007 it was estimated to be 6% of people who'd ever lived being currently alive [1]

[0] In the original sense of factoid - being fact-like, but not a fact (i.e. not true). C.f. android, like a man

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

A society that is producing children will not die off. The U.S. saw over 3.6 millions births in 2024.

American is not seen as promoting human rights, and to infer all immigrants are good is naive, hate to get off my porch about this. sits back down on rocking chair whistling “I Wish I was In Dixie” and widdling a hangman with the noose almost finished, just a few more threads

Japan and Korea have almost no immigration and abysmally low birth rates. Your arguments don't really hold water. Having children is actually more of a burden on the state, as those kids need schools, (in most western countries publicly funded) healthcare, etc. Taking in a healthy immigrant at 20 is better almost all round from a purely economic point of view.

And immigration doesn't suppress wages any more or less than having tons of kids would over the long term. A person "taking" a job is still a taking a person whether they were born or immigrated. This is ignoring the fact that more people over time enlarge the economy and opportunity in it. Would the United States be a better country today if it didn't accept the mass immigration from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe between 1850-1914 and had 1/4 the population?