The world has probably passed peak pollution(sustainabilitybynumbers.com) |
The world has probably passed peak pollution(sustainabilitybynumbers.com) |
United States. Population: 335M. Vehicles: 305M.
Germany. Population: 85M. Vehicles: 52M.
India. Population: 1428M. Vehicles: 79M.
China. Population: 1400M. Vehicles: 500M.
Ethiopia. Population: 121M. Vehicles: 1.2M.
Nigeria. Population: 230M. Vehicles: 13M.
Indonesia. Population: 279M. Vehicles: 23M.
etc.
“Peak pollution” sounds like the amount of pollution in the environment will actually _decrease_ going forward.
That is simply not true, it will continue to increase, just slightly less fast.
Sorry if I don’t feel euphoric right now.
Their half-life is shorter than a day. On the same magnitude of SO2.
The one of CO is indeed much smaller.
The ratio of (pollution/living person) will decrease. Unless you want to start unaliving people then this is a fixed fact of the world we live on.
Oh I thought of another one, if people smoke more cigarettes then the ratio of cancer deaths to packs smoked decreases!
Anyone who wishes to claim pollution is always a subjective concept is welcome to drink a few gallons of water from Lake Karachay.
Putting the above aside though, I would disagree. Everything is subjective except math (and even there, I think there’s a debate), but I would definitely not classify pollution as _highly_ subjective, that makes it sound it belongs to the category of things that particularly lack consensus, which is definitely not the case amongst the scientific community. Not to say there’s 100% agreement on all things, but I think there’s a broad consensus.
Satellite images show biggest methane leaks come from Russia and US (2022)
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/over...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Nord_Stream_pipeline_sabo... (2022, 400k t)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak (2015-2016, 100k t)
- Peak pollution - check.
- Peak coal - not yet.
- Peak oil - maybe 2019, but aftermath of COVID affects numbers.[1]
- Peak baby - 2013. [2]
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-19/the-status-of-...
[2] https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/life/2022/11/12/the-stats-guy...
https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...
> Looking back, my only Berklee classmates that got successful were the ones who were fiercely focused, determined, and undistractable.
> While you’re here, presidents will change, the world will change, and the media will try to convince you how important it all is.
> But it’s not. None of it matters to you now.
If humanity can't work through these fundamental math and science comprehension problems, we're doomed.
We're just hovering for a second like Wile E Coyote.
edit: how can I leave out space junk, that's always been my fav.
Whenever I think about protecting the environment, I think about preventing the catastrophes that are wars.
Unfortunately it's the politicians that are not beholden to ballot boxes that have no incentive to stop blowing people up.
Science almost always gives you a fighting chance but there seems to be no motivation let alone research directions on unchecked income inequality.
I’m from the United States, a very wealthy country if you use the arithmetic mean to calculate prosperity (which is the devil’s own summary statistic in such matters), but children live in tent encampments even in ostensibly wealthy cities and it goes downhill from there.
I hope climate damage becomes a relevant problem because we have ideas for how to tackle that, arguably even credible plans.
Income inequality is utterly unchecked and will wreck civilization sooner.
Of secondary importance is what a depressing commentary this is on the ethical caliber of our intellectual elite.
Of primary importance is that only a tennis court and a guillotine will stop them, something one hopes we’d all like to avoid.
Pretty sure this is not true as long as birth rates are declining. What is that saying about assumptions…
Given the modus operandi of "manufacture first, find out about carcinogenic / animal-extinction-properties second", it's almost certainly a given that we've not yet passed peak pollution because we keep creating new forms of pollution that are harder and harder to clean up.
edit: well according to: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-update-2022
it'll be 2083 (!) before we peak in population
But the way that the model's predictions have come true is different than what's been popularized. Instead of mass die-offs from famine and pollution, we're seeing population collapse because of birth control, declining fertility, and the rising (opportunity) cost of raising a family. Instead of seeing a collapse in industrial output because of declining resources, we're seeing a collapse in industrial output because of market saturation and a shift toward services and online experiences. Instead of pollution growing unbounded, it's actually declining because of green technology and de-industrialization.
The world is still trending toward a dystopian hellscape, but the dystopian hellscape is not a barren planet where nothing grows and we've stripped everything bare, it's a dystopian hellscape of everybody glued to their device and ignoring social interaction or family formation because Fortnite is more interesting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicat...
Global coal supply likely peaked in 2023 and then to decline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273
Can't say for sure until another few years have passed, nonetheless every country in the world has coal on hold or in decline save for India and China.
China is the largest producer of renewable technology and energy (?), India is building out the worlds largest solat array farm (albeit "only" good for 16 million households).
Seeing countries like India even out (and even going under replacement rate) gives me some heavy pessimism about population graying. I had always thought that heavy swingers like them would carry on the whole growing population thing for a good few more decades.
Looks like we're more or less on a crash course in the next few decades, especially with lifespans moving as they are.
Of course a lot of this is just delayed by higher life expectancies. Aging populations will require major social reforms in our lifetime, and I don't think society is really prepared
1: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
Are you worried 8 billion is somehow not enough humans?
Arguments by smart people like Sabine Hossenfelder have led me to question the conventional wisdom on population growth.
For example, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI1AaZ9OkH8 .
A rapidly shrinking population is not ideal.
I think your source's claim that "The planet will never see more babies than it has in 2013" is open to question.
To just use the US as an example: mainstream Americans have a declining fertility rate, and we have no reason to think that is going to reverse in the foreseeable future. Immigrants have higher fertility, but they tend to converge to the mainstream after a generation or two. So, that seems to support the article's contention, at least for the US – and if we look at other countries, we observe things are broadly similar, so that in turn supports that contention for the planet as a whole.
However, we also observe in the US small, ultra-conservative religious minorities, such as the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who still have a high fertility rate, and also have high youth retention (80-90% of their children will stay in the group as adults). Now, even though these groups are a tiny percentage of the population, the miracle of exponential growth means that within 2-3 centuries, they could be the majority of the US population, which could then result in a national baby boom. And, eventually, as they spread across the globe (they exist to varying degrees in other countries too), a global baby boom. So 2013's "peak baby" may end up being surpassed.
Of course, there is no guarantee that is going to happen – maybe they'll get to a certain size, and then they'll stop growing. And of course, it is physically impossible to sustain exponential growth indefinitely. However, it remains a possible future that they won't stop growing until after they've gotten so big that 2013 turns out not to be the year of "peak baby" after all. Maybe it will actually be 2213 or 2313 instead. Our descendants (if one happens to have them) will find out.
Peak-anything is just shorthand for "the first peak on record" because our culture and ability to record-keep has only really existed in a population and resource boom period.
I agree that circumstances might mean that the global peak baby might be 200-300 years away, but the thing that makes the current round of peak-anything relevant is that we don't know how our social and economic systems will function when certain things are in long-term decline (even if they do pick up again in a few hundred years).
If we knew what a few centuries of low birth rates or low oil consumption looked like, we wouldn't be nearly as interested in what "peak-those-things" means, the same way we're not all that interested in specific market peaks because we understand the boom/bust cycles and long-term productivity increases, etc.
It's so unhelpful to speculate about what the world will be like 100 years from now.
Think about what things were like in the 1920's and how unrecognizable the world is by comparison. Then, consider that technology is being developed significantly more quickly than it was in the 1920's.
I don't know if any realm of human sciences where extrapolating exponential growth yields trustworthy results, outside maybe of wealth accumulation, and even then not for 2 centuries.
Secular pronatalism doesn't seem like it has a lot of staying power with most people as an ideology. But I've been on board for a long time, and so have a lot of my friends. So maybe the best answer is the common sense one: Wait a few generations for all those not susceptible to the secular pronatalism mind virus to select out of the gene pool, and hope society doesn't crumble under its own technical debt in the meanwhile.
Only if their reproductive habits do not change in that time. Hard to project out 3 centuries with a good deal of accuracy.
What is a mainstream American?
Humans certainly contribute to pollution, but we should address some ethical questions first.
And, what are the ethical questions we should address first?
Most countries continue to steadily expand transport infrastructure. Returning some of that back to a natural state, or just abandoning it, does happen but remains very rare.
I agree with your overall point, and about the Amish and Orthodox Jews (especially the ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic/Haredi).
However, for Mormons, I'm not sure that is true. Mormons, in the US at least, have plummeting fertility rates, and also a lot of problems with retaining their younger members. They don't belong to the same category as Amish and ultra-Orthodox do, they are converging to the American secular mainstream while those groups remain on a clearly different trajectory from it.
It is very unlikely that any group will have long term exponential growth. As pointed elsewhere where this type of growth doesn't scale. The groups you mention have been around for centuries and they haven't become dominant. Social cohesion falls apart over time.
Ah yes, the "breeder" gene. Very sound thinking.
At some point economies will do the math and public policy and figure out how to keep the expansion going.
The US hasn't done it because Mexican immigration fills the gaps. But Germany, China, Russia, and (holy crap) South Korea (although I suspect South Korea will absorb a shitton of North Koreans some day when the regime collapses).
What happenes when biotech extends human life and achieves the artificial womb? Go ahead, say its impossible.
The mere attempting is what I think isn't especially worthwhile. Actually helping is worthwhile.
And if someone is building their life to somewhat directly solve these problems, then they aren't getting distracted. They may have chosen to become journalists or sustainability experts.
Ditto if they're in a field like music paying attention but not so much attention that they're distracted. Their contributions to society within their field can often indirectly help.
I see people who are pulled in a lot of different directions by their heartstrings and I don't think it's effective. Many latch on to someone like Bernie or Andrew Yang. Sivers said "the media" and I think right now it's social media. And I'm distracted by it as well. I'm going to have to do something deliberate to cut my social media distraction.
Yes, we have better health care and more products, but we also have more pollution, more meaningless jobs, weaker local communities (especially in the most developed parts of the world), and beautiful species are going extinct.
Actually, I think the standard of living, at least in the long-term and for the many future climate refugees, is not actually that much improved.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-07-25-mn-4650-s...
We screwed up this hard because we burned fossil fuels as they were highly profitable for a handful of our species.
I think it's important to note that you are making this statement with virtually no evidence about the long term sustainability of this standard of living. It's great to be sitting on all this bounty, sure, but from the perspective of history we're not even out of the prototyping phase. If climate change models are even remotely accurate, for example, then the standard of living we are currently enjoying will not be shared by future generations in any nation. I definitely take your point that it's unreflective for a citizen of a rich nation to say "pollution for me, but not for thee", however if in the long term we experience severe ecological collapse as a result then is it really worth it for 2-4 generations to have iPhones and air conditioning? Only time can ultimately tell, but I think it's critical to consider how radically unique the last ~200 years of human history have been, and as a result how poorly equipped we are to extrapolate its lessons into the future.
This is why I was always skeptical of dystopias that depend on overpopulation. If life is so miserable why would people continue to have so many children?
Several of those feedback loops came from people seeing the theoretical scenario and the evidence for it mounting. Like literally the phrase "if we don't do something - this will happen" is the rallying cry. It's silly to say it was an oversight in the model that shows that things need to be done.
> If life is so miserable why would people continue to have so many children?
Something humans like to do to escape misery is: sex.
This right here is why I'm child free.
First, My own upbringing did nothing to equip me to properly raise a child. I simply cannot trust myself to do a good job.
Second, why would I bring a child into a world where each year will only be worst than the last, and their lot in life is to suffer the decline of the natural world and perhaps civilization as we know it until they themselves have to make the same choice? I'm sure someday the future will look brighter but it sure as heck isn't today, or any time in the next 50 years.
> 1. If the present growth trends... continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years...
> 2. It is possible to alter these growth trends...
> 3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success
Far from "missing the negative feedback loops", I think that amplifying that feedback was the whole point.
Also, we're only halfway through the original period, so it seems premature to declare victory.
Definitely in another dark age in that sense, due to the postmodern decline of meaningful written communication on paper.
Even though your statement is meant to be evocative, as opposed to factually descriptive, it sure feels to me like it captures the zeitgeist.
Which is... disappointing, upsetting, sad.
I suspect that, like me, you hope you're wrong.
And comparison of different, potentially codependent variables, is notably relevant.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
> Today the lake is completely infilled, acting as "a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility."
I hope most understood that I meant to say peak greenhouse gas emissions.
Don't do it unless it's perfect right?
good luck with that.
At a certain point sufficient warming could trigger a cascade. So far we haven't done that, but it's incorrect to say there's been no release of stored CO2.
Humans are presumably always going to want babies. There's nothing to really replace them.
On the other hand, coal/oil/pollution all seem highly likely to be a transient phase of industrialization. There's no reason to think we should ever go back to burning coal or oil once we have renewables.
Oil is tricky in that we do like plastic and there's no obvious alternate material, but the amount of oil needed for plastic will be minuscule compared to the amount of oil burned as we bootstrap to renewable energy sources.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-13/earths-population-rea...
If you have any amount of energy storage then the time delay doesn't matter. You turn on the alternate generation method when the storage is starting to run down. It doesn't matter if it takes an hour to come up to temperature because you still have two hours of storage left.
The actual problem is that "shortfall" is a relative concept. Do you have to burn coal because it's cloudy all week, or just because you spent a lot of resources building coal-fired power plants instead of solar panels or wind turbines or nuclear reactors? How often are you going to run the things?
The economics of building and maintaining an entire fleet of coal power plants to use only in a demand emergency is extremely poor. Like you're better off spending half the money on nuclear reactors you can run 100% of the time and the other half on electrifying transportation so you can have a huge demand buffer in the form of vehicle batteries and then get people who only drive a few miles per day to delay their charging by a few days through pricing because a full charge lasts them three weeks anyway.
What can be said with confidence is that the Earth currently grows enough food to support 10 billion people, when some people back in the 60s and 70s predicted massive starvation and shortages would have happened long before that.
But unlimited growth is always on the menu for startups and companies! Investors, am I right?!
/s
If you look at the actual statistics on the growth of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the US and Israel, and Old Order Amish in the US, the actual figures are inconsistent with “net result 0”
Wait, what? How could we have possible done all this without fossil fuels? Our modern life takes immense amounts of energy and fossil fuels are basically free energy we can suck out of the ground.
And I'm the first one here to critique the profit motive, but fossil fuels are profitable because they are a really easy to use, dense, transportable energy source.
I mean the term quite broadly and inclusively, since many of the big divides within American society (ethnicity, race, politics, class) make a relatively modest difference to fertility rates, and those differences appear to be shrinking over time
People are always talking about a “post-scarcity” world, but isn’t that in some sense globally true while locally false today? The US (which I appreciate is not the whole world but a signal example of having just passed the knee in the hockey-stick on Gini) burns something like 30-40% of key agricultural outputs as ethanol representing a net disaster on emissions.
At what point do we acknowledge that we actively choose a governing/managing/ruling class that has no upper bound on conspicuous consumption? Yachts don’t cut it anymore, now you’re not a player until you’ve got a fucking private space program.
I did very well in my career once and might again, and I remember feeling outright guilty when I had a house with “his and hers” sinks in the bathroom, that felt really opulent (because it is).
Bezos has “his and hers” custom private jets that fly more often than many people drive or train (this is public record), a huge airplane carrying one passenger sometimes daily.
I hear a lot of hot air about universal basic income and stuff, but what’s stopping our leaders? Corporate profits shatter record after record, rank and file workers are choosing between basic necessity A or necessity B, you could have lower margins and pay people Universal Basic Income in the form of a living wage. Then it’s not even big government or “welfare” or some other boogeyman.
They’re just dark triad liars, it’s just nonsense, the elite are not trying to change the world for the better: they’re trying to dig deeper moats and build higher walls around consumption that’s gone from conspicuous to fucking genocidal.
The sci-fi dystopias about overpopulation never really come up with a mechanism by which the birth rate remains high despite low infant and child mortality and low economic need for human labor. It always seems to boil down to "people are controlled by irrational instincts".
There are multiple grave markers listing children that died under the age of 10. Like a family had a 4 year old die, then had a baby 2 years later and then 3 years later buried that baby in the same grave as their older sibling.
That is half-lives work.
Also, I'm not one to complain about downvotes - I can take my knocks, but I'm a bit surprised that my comment is rather disliked; it's just my thought at that moment.
That aside, fifty years ago was when the dangers of increasing atmospheric insulation was raised as a serious potential issue in the UN, and fifty years ago was when the think tank ecology surrounding fossil fuel producers started churning articles on ice ages, Climate, who really knows?, killing public transport initiatives, etc.
Hindsight is famously 20|20 but it serves us well to remember past playbooks; it wasn't just pure stupidty, there were people who knew better actively promoting larger cars and greater per capita consumption rather than looking to lower total emissions.
That said, even when there's evidently plenty of malice around, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that enough cooperators can figure out how to coordinate despite all the damned defectors!
With this realisation alone you might be in the top percentiles of the population.
> I'm sure someday the future will look brighter but it sure as heck isn't today, or any time in the next 50 years.
And yet it still might be better than at least 99.98% of human history (50 out of 300k+ years).
But consider, I dunno, salt? A little built of salt in the environment is normal. But a whole lot of it is pollution.
dPop / dt = fertility rate * pop (birth rate) - deaths
Note the "current population" factor in that. As long as the number of births depends on the current population (i.e. anyone has a chance to give birth), this equation will result in an exponential curve. If the fertility rate is greater than replacement rate (that "deaths" term that I've handwaved away), the population will exponentially grow. If it's less than the replacement rate, the population will exponentially decay. But it is necessarily exponential, because it's a constant rate multiplied by the current population, and if you remember your calculus, an exponential is defined by a constant growth rate.
There's a whole subfield of population dynamics, and I remember lots and lots of predator/prey models, resource constraint models, etc. from my applied calculus class. Some of those do have non-exponential growth curves, eg. a basic 2-species predator/prey model gives rise to sinusoidal population curves as the increase in prey leads to an increase in predators, which results in more of the prey being killed and eaten, which results in a decrease of food, which results in the predators dying off. But what they all have in common is death rates that are proportional to some function of the current population. In other words, you have to kill off proportionally more of the current population based on how many people they are, something which would be ethically unacceptable to most humans. If you just have natural deaths (i.e. a death rate proportional to Pop(t - life expectancy)), you always get either exponential growth or exponential decay, because that's the way the math works.
I suppose there was one other population curve that gives a sigmoid function (i.e. a logistic curve that asymptotically approaches a limit but never reaches it). This is what you get when there is a natural resource limit to giving birth, i.e. when instead of births being fertility rate * total population, it's fertility rate * (exponentially decreasing fraction of the population). Many people find this scenario ethically challenging as well: in plain English, it means that only the elite can afford to have kids, or alternatively - cap the number of houses so that only the top X families can have a house and raise a child, and then create social stigma around having kids when you cannot afford those increasingly scarce markers of stability. It is disturbingly close to reality, though.
I think it mostly has to do with increasing desires for a high standard of living when it becomes possible and the pressure of high density cities making lots of kids an unattractive prospect.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/four-western-provocations-le...
That being said, this is the wrong forum for this both in terms of audience and topic. Awaiting the mass downvotes for an argument that holds merit but is difficult to swallow for the US public.
No, it was created by the Russian Federation invading Ukraine in 2014.
It was exacerbated by the Russian Federation launching a larger scale, broader invasion in 2022.
> It’s incredibly naive to assume that Russia was the sole malicious actor here.
Whether or not there is some standard by which some other actor is “malicious”, Russia is, in fact, the aggressor in the war.
> I wonder how we would react if the soviet union was tipped to expand into Mexico.
Mostly wondering where the Soviet Union hid out for the last 33 years.
That was the point, it was shut down - great! But to think that NATO expansion is not seen as a threat to Russia, having nukes on their doorstep is silly. And Ukraine creeping slowly closer to admission is a step too far for Russia.
“President Putin has made Ukraine's preliminary steps to joining NATO the principal grounds for the Russian invasion of Feb. 24, 2022.”
If a NATO-like power controlled by Russia was on our doorstep, we would do the same thing.
The main ways it might not happen would be if either (1) they (gradually or suddenly) abandon their current culture for a less fertile one, (2) mainstream society persecutes them sufficiently. Both are entirely possible, but neither is anywhere near certain.
The situation for the (Old Order) Amish is more difficult, since – unlike ultra-Orthodox Jews – they'll run out of enough land to sustain their agrarian lifestyle, and will have to transition to a more urban one. While the more urban lifestyle of ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrates it is possible for insular high fertility religious minorities to exist in an urban setting, there is a real risk that they might lose their fertility and/or their insularity in the process.
Also, people often bring up the problem Israel has with many ultra-Orthodox Jews not working and relying on government subsidies to live. That is much less of a problem in the US than it is in Israel, so the sustainability of that lifestyle is less of a barrier to future growth in the US than it is in Israel. Furthermore, the fact they manage to grow so much in the US without doing that, means being forced to stop doing that isn't necessarily going to stop their growth in Israel either.
And Kiryas Joel is expanding in its de facto area: as its spiritual leader, Satmar Rebbe Aron Teitelbaum likes to say, its “holy borders” go further than its legal boundaries under New York state law, although very likely the legal boundaries will at some point grow too. And, there are similar ultra-Orthodox communities in other parts of New York state, and also in New Jersey (especially Lakewood)
Personally, I'd rather have fewer kids and be able to give them more attention and resources.
Plausibly, being much closer to mainstream culture makes it much easier for people brought up JW to leave, whereas people raised in communities where English isn't even their first language, find that much harder.
In 2023, Israel contained over 1.28 million ultra-Orthodox Jews, 13.5% of Israel’s population. It is estimated that by the end of this decade, it will be over 16%. [0] By shortly after 2065, it is estimated that 50% of Israeli children will be Haredi. [1] I think this is counterevidence to your claim - the social indoctrination processes necessary to maintain Israeli ultra-Orthodox Judaism have already scaled to over 1 million people, and are projected to scale much further than that
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredim-are-fastest-growing-po...
There is already a minority of them, the Hardal (Nationalist Haredi), who are happy to enlist, but whose birth rates, retention rates, and general lifestyle, are similar to the Haredi mainstream
That said, there is a subgroup of the Mennonites, the Old Order Mennonites, who have fertility and retention much closer to that of the Old Order Amish. The Wenger Mennonites, in particular, are rather similar in those measures. But only around a third of Old Order Mennonites are Wenger, and only around 15% of Mennonites in the US are Old Order.
That area of the US has some of the most newly unaffordable areas in the country
People assume that technology necessarily encourages secularism, but it doesn't inevitably do so. Technology also makes possible new methods of social control which can be used to suppress secularism.
Steady state population should be the long term goal, at least until we start moving into orbital colonies or something. But unfortunately that's an anathema to growth oriented economies which makes it the bad guy in economics and politics.
The population only went over 2 billion in 1927. Dropping from current numbers is fine, and less competition over space would be nice.
The escalation in 2022 was an attempt to complete the war started in 2014; Ukraine had abandoned efforts to join NATO years before Russia started the war and only returned to them after the invasion in which Russia directly occupied a large portion of the country and used proxy, mercenary, and regular forces under false flags to contest another large portion.
“They are trying to get help to defend themselves in the war of aggression we started and have been waging continuously for 8 years” may well be the actual reason for the aggressor escalating the forces committed to that war, but its easy enough to stop people from feeling the need to defend themselves from a war of aggression by, you know, not doing them.
Analyzing the Russia-Ukraine war as if it started in 2022 makes as much sense as analyzing the Israel-Palestine war as if it started in 2023.
> If a NATO-like power controlled by Russia was on our doorstep, we would do the same thing.
Well, maybe the US could just not wage long wars of aggression against its neighbors, and then they wouldn't feel the need to turn to this “NATO-like power” (which would never exist, because Russia is a crap ally, as evidenced by their attempt to create a NATO-like alliance with the CSTO.)
Is that fashion going to remain, though? Everything goes out of style eventually. I think we are already seeing some cracks where people are starting to question why having children is so "wrong". Nothing happens overnight, but I'm not so sure the children today will grow up in that same environment.
But I see some change in sentiment around questioning what good is being rich if you can't enjoy it with your children. It is not happening overnight by any stretch of the imagination, but I think the tides are slowly starting to turn.
Were they? High-achiever families routinely demonize having relationships at 16 but then turn it around VERY QUICKLY after getting that college degree and want their children to get married and have kids before 30.
(That said many high achievers themselves don't actually want to have kids, despite family pressure to have kids at 30.)
You could almost call that a genocide... if the originator of that messaging authored it to cause a birth collapse. Throw in every public policy decision made to economically destroy single-earner households and it really almost starts looking like genocide (or democide?)...
My hunch is that the people who still decide to reproduce, despite all the reasons people who advocate for not having children talk about, likely have some sort of genetic predisposition for reproduction - a strong innate need.
After all the non-breeders die off, the future belongs to the reproducers.
1000 years ago some subset of people chose not to have children, and humanity did just fine, and that same group of so-called "non-breeders" still exists today. Therefore we can conclude it's not purely a matter of genetics. There are a huge number of reasons people make that choice. People even change their minds during their life. It's not just a YES/NO switch in your genetic code somewhere.
There have always been, and always will be, people who don’t have kids, for a whole host of reasons.
But that’s not the argument (or at least, not the steelman version of it, as opposed to the strawman one) - the argument is that if there are certain heritable traits that discourage people from having children, then all else being equal, natural selection will cause the frequency of those traits to decline over time, albeit often not to zero.
The all else being equal part is very important. In a society with strong social pressure to reproduce, a trait which makes people less likely to want children may not be strongly selected against - because the social pressure to reproduce means desire to have children only has a small impact on the odds of actually having them - whereas in a society which is much more individualist, it may have much more of an impact, so the selective pressure against that trait may be much stronger. And of course, a trait which produces less desire for children might nonetheless be selected for because it produces some other countervailing advantage
Still, I think the argument does have some weight - that in contemporary Western society where reproduction is far more of a voluntary choice than it once was, biological and cultural factors which encourage reproduction are going to be selected for to a much greater degree than they were in the less individualist societies of decades and centuries past, where less such encouragement was needed
It's a serious and interesting question as to why evolution tolerated/encouraged homosexuality in a small but significant proportion of the population. If you have the time, this article gives a good overview of the discussion [1].
Depending on your answer to that question - along with your views about how evolution affects modern humans another - it's natural to think about homosexuality will occur in future humans.
Could we have more, less or about the same of it? Will everybody be bisexual? How might medical fertility treatments affect the outcomes? It's an open field of ideas.
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/the-evolutionary...
On the one hand, you'd expect humans (animals) to have completely bred out all forms of infertility -- except that there are non-heritable causes of infertility. (In fact, all causes of infertility must be non-heritable, or at least not inherited! :)
On the other hand, it's surely true that characteristics which deprioritize or diminish the likelihood of reproduction are bred out, however incompletely. Whether it's a sense of taste that enjoys poisons, a risk-taking brain that kicks in before fertility, homosexuality (in males at least), or just not wanting children.
These characteristics are bred down to a sustainable level, obviously. But they are clearly not bred out fully, nor are they consistently bred "up".
If allele A causes increased desire to reproduce than allele B, then in a society in which reproduction is viewed as an optional extra, all else being equal, allele A is likely to predominate allele B over time. Conversely, in a more traditional society in which everyone is subject to a strong social expectation to reproduce, allele A would have far less of an advantage over allele B.
An allele might lead to increased reproduction indirectly rather than directly. For example, if an allele makes a person more likely to be religious, and if religious people are more likely to have kids, then even though that allele does not directly impact desire to reproduce, it may be selected for due to its indirect impact on reproduction.
That's genetics; coming to culture: if subculture A puts higher emphasis on reproduction than subculture B, then all else being equal, in the long-run subculture A is likely to outnumber subculture B, irrespective of any genetic factors. However, defections from subculture A to subculture B may erase much of its innate demographic advantage. This suggests in the long-run, the most demographically successful subcultures will be those which combine sustained high fertility with sustained insularity (social barriers to defection to other subcultures)–which is exactly what we observe with groups like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The only exception I can think of is if you have some mutation they didn't. But in that case if you're aware of the mutation the consequences are likely to be awful, which is a great case for not having biological children.
We already see this in Israel - a big increase in Haredi women pursuing secular careers. In other communities worldwide, that development ended up significantly undermining the patriarchal culture and producing a demographic transition to lower fertility. But, will it necessarily have the same consequences for the Haredim? We will have to wait and see: maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Precedent would suggest the Haredim won’t be able to avoid that outcome, but the situation on the ground suggests that maybe they will
I’m not claiming any of this is inevitable, only possible, plausible. Nobody knows for certain what the future holds-we shall find out
To be honest I really dislike this kind of vague speculative fearmongering when targeted at specific minority groups, which seems extremely dangerous. It historically blends right into overt bigotry and sectarian oppression.
The US has a long, proud tradition of all sorts of unusual sects and cults trying to do their own thing, often in somewhat closed communities, sometimes to the dismay of their neighbors, sometimes failing pretty badly, but usually without really breaking fair laws or causing serious mischief to anyone else (but also occasionally breaking a lot of laws and hurting people; the police should go after such cults). We all owe quite a few of the rights we take for granted to the hard struggle of some of these groups to make their own choices.
I am not accounting for immigration of course, but from the wider point of view, immigration is musical chairs. Sri Lanka is well below replacement and still falling fast. Who is going to immigrate there? Ditto for most other countries.
Everybody who gets up in the morning and behaves in the ways they honestly believe are right has religion, including the non-spiritual.
I write “beliefs” in quotes because there are beliefs (i.e. assumptions) that people might have philosophically on how they model the world, and there are “beliefs” that people espouse they have as a means to bond with other members of the tribe.
I often joke to my peers: it doesn't matter what I invest in, my best financial decision was buying a house, my worst financial decision was having kids, the rest is just screwing around in the margin.
Yes, there's also a kind of mandate in the bible to be fruitful and multiply, and the fact that if you grow up in a larger family you tend to have a larger family, but I would bet the other factors matter more.
In that way, the pendulum is already starting to swing the other way in the US with the loosening of child labor laws.
Secularly, though, we’d have to do something to make it not hellishly expensive and inconvenient to have children. The US can’t even extend the child tax credit, much less fix healthcare, housing, education, food deserts, or childcare all at once.
I'm guessing the only thing that will ever reverse this will be the invention of artificial wombs.
For what it's worth, I'm personally on board with having as many children as possible. Life is a cherished miracle. But I also can't bear children and take no risk in this endeavor.
Seeing it from the side of a Woman, it's no wonder birth rates are declining.
Whoa that reads almost as loaded as my reply:
I suspect collapse of nativity is why Feminism(tm) kills civilizations throughout antiquity.
We don't have a few generations until we are beyond the point where we can mathematically recover unless we develop economic mass adult-cloning technology and develop the psycho-social faculties to integrate that into a healthy (enough) society. The world won't end, but let's just say hyper-advanced visions of the future seem unlikely at this point.
In many traditional societies, there is strong social pressure for marriage and children, arranged and semi-arranged marriages, etc - such that a person’s sexual orientation may not make much difference to their odds of heterosexually reproducing. Some people might enjoy heterosexual reproduction and others might endure it but they’ll do it all the same. So that would limit the selective pressure against genes that increase the likelihood of homosexuality
In the mainstream contemporary West, if heterosexual reproduction doesn’t appeal to you, then you just don’t do it-so selective pressure against those genes may exist to a degree that it formerly did not. On the other hand, the new possibilities for non-heterosexual reproduction (such as IVF, sperm/egg donation, surrogacy) might counteract that.
Not to mention the changing political dynamics of having a lot of old people outnumber younger people by 2 or 3 times in the voting booth. The gerontocracy is bad enough now. Imagine it 3x worse.
https://www.indexmundi.com/graphs/population-pyramids/united...
Looks fine to me. What's your definition of "old" here? Are you specifically worried about Korea like you mentioned in another post?
I'd worry about the implications of a global 1.6 birthrate if they were actually going to happen. I don't think that's very likely, though. I don't know if we're even going to get down to 2.
Unless someone thinks of a democratic, scalable solution it's going to be a lot of pain for a lot of people for a long time.
Kiryas Joel NY, Lakewood NJ, certain parts of Brooklyn. They basically have their own government, and they have far less state government oversight due to politicians not wanting to go against them.
They drive around NYC with vehicles that look like cop cars, acting like cops, which would get most other groups charged with impersonating a government official. They elect themselves to the school board and vote to prioritize funding for their group’s children, and deprioritize funding for any other group’s children. Etc etc.
Not that they are the only group to have done it, but these are your easy to google examples.
Basically, I'm repeating the contention of sociologist Eric Kaufmann's book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth–that in the long-run religious (ultra-)conservatives will dominate due to high birth and retention rates.
It isn't "fearmongering", because that assumes one is presenting a takeover by religious conservatives as negative. One might view it as positive. One might view it as neutral. I'm not presenting any value judgement of it here.
The contention isn't about any religious group in particular, it is about ultra-conservative religious groups in general. Ultra-Orthodox Jews happen to be the clearest example of the phenomenon, but there are other candidates – Old Order Amish, Latin Mass Roman Catholics, Salafist Muslims, etc.
Personally, I doubt ultra-Orthodox Jews will ever single-handedly takeover America, because in the scenario I am talking about, there will likely be other (non-Jewish) ultra-conservative religious groups, with which they'll share power. But I do think it plausible that in 2 or 3 centuries from now, North America will be a much more reliigious and much more conservative place than it is today. Not certain, of course, but plausible.
Economists like to pretend that everything is a continuous function of price, but this very rarely reflects real markets. Most utility functions are step functions; there is some point at which changing your behavior becomes economical, and above it everybody switches, while below it nobody switches. People can either afford to raise a child in the lifestyle they expect, or they can't - and many of the sacrifices in lifestyle don't move the needle in fundamental living costs. For having a child, that point appears to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you make childcare and college free and give 2 years of maternity leave and ensure that you can buy a 3BR+ house on an average income, then sure middle-class people will start having kids again. All the middle class people will start having kids again, because they all face the same economic constraints. And then you'll have fertility > 2 again, and the population will start exponentially growing.
You could have a large per-child subsidy and cap at 2, but this also is a lot harder to generate the desired effect than expected. Accidental pregnancies are a thing. Twins are a thing. Infertility is a thing. Careers are a thing. People who want to remain childfree regardless of cost are a thing. If you cap at 2, you'll get a fertility rate under 2 because of all these other considerations.
And this is what's playing out empirically across many countries right now. A lot of European countries have generous subsidies for childbearing; they still find that they can't raise the fertility rate above 1.5 or so. China lifted its one-child only policy, moving it to 2 children in 2016 and 3 children in 2021, and finds that fertility still collapsed (even after instituting subsidies) and they can't convince people to have babies. There are significant non-monetary costs to parenthood; it's a whole other lifestyle, and the money involved needs to be pretty large to alter that.
The best answer I can think of is that sexuality is somehow very fragile for evolution to calibrate, so even natural selection isn’t powerful enough to select heterosexuality reliably.
But it’s hard to argue that persuasively with a biological basis which we don’t yet have.
Compared to the other evolutionary arguments for homosexuality it also doesn’t scale well to other non reproductive sexual behaviours.
Compared to what? Where do you draw the line of the "pre" technology? Technology has been as part of human society since before we invented history.
Do you have a specific point after which you think technology became a net negative? Do you think thinks were fine pre-industrial revolution, but after we invented the steam engine things when to shit? Perhaps it was the domestication of bananas that really took us away from living in harmony with nature rather than twisting it to our own ends.
I don't think it really makes a sense to draw a line in history and say everything after this point is bad. The only sensible way to draw a rational technophobic line is to look at specific technologies and their effects and decide if your life will be better or worse with each.
Interesting to note that this is what the Amish actually do.
The popular depiction is of people who blindly live as if they're in the 1790s, but it is not that simple. The various Amish communities all do things slightly different from one another, and the technology allowed in different communities is not homogenous.
For ex., the Amish family just down the road from me has a solar panel on one of their barns, and a small forklift, I think diesel-powered (might be battery). But on the occasional Sunday when the meeting is at their house, there's not a car to be seen.
I've read of Amish carpenters who actually use a computer to run their business. It's usually kept in the workshop, away from the family home, though, and IIRC none of them had an internet connection.
It is indeed. I would argue that many people make this choice; we pick which technologies and tools make our lives better. The right and ability do this is one that I think our society would do well to protect as it promotes freedom, accessibility and choice.
The Amish differ only in doing it as a more cohesive social group and on a larger scale.
To wit, the negative effects of technology are simply an increasing function of how advanced it is. There is no need to think in terms of "pre" or "post" good technology. As it becomes more powerful, we need greater wisdom to control it. And of course, we completely lack that wisdom.
Laughably easy to disprove. Gunpowder is less sinpler and older than antibiotics and sterilization techniques. Are you saying that somehow the negative effects of saving people from lethal and debilitating infections outweighs the negative effects of greatly increasing the our ability to kill eachother?
so the macro view, that some technologies have actually lowered our standard of living, is difficult, because it's not the technology's fault! it's only when you have to deal with other people that there are problems. throw in 7 billion other people and of course things are bad .
Small tangent, I just want to point out that all of the issues you've pointed out in first world countries are maybe a problem in the cities, but not so outside of them. To wit, where I live in small town Iowa, USA, there's no pollution; there's a strong sense of community; plenty of beautiful species; and if I wanted a "meaningful" non-tech job I could easily get hired working on any number of farms in the area.
This is basically pure anecdote.
I suspect it was downvoted because that line suggests dismissal or contempt for people who don't have children.
There are many people across all generations who haven't had children (either by choice or because they were unable for various reasons), and their lifespans and social contributions are no more or less on average compared to people that do have children.
I didn't interpret the original comment as contemptuous of either opinion. But it is undeniable that both groups are sensitive about their choices (or unfortunate inability to choose differently).
I think how the question is phrased really matters.
How much do you value your life? Or how much would someone have to pay you to kill yourself?
Are these even different questions?
I guess it's possible people are just ignorant, but in general I see people especially men acting recklessly enough with their lives that they seem to not ascribe the highest values to them. They would rather have a shorter life where they have more money and other things.
Driving was one I decided on early: I didn't get a driver's license until 25, to get well out of the danger zone for auto accidents; and then less than a year after I got it, I moved to Finland (an uncommonly safe country in its own right) and I've been living off of public transit and bike paths that aren't thin painted lines next to motor traffic ever since.
> No matter how often I may be told, "You cannot understand the meaning of life so do not think about it, but live," I can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false. The two drops of honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel truth longer than the rest: my love of family, and of writing -- art as I called it -- were no longer sweet to me. "Family"... said I to myself. But my family -- wife and children -- are also human. They are placed just as I am: they must either live in a lie or see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or watch them? That they may come to the despair that I feel, or else be stupid? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them: each step in knowledge leads them to the truth. And the truth is death.”
Once upon a time there was no choice if you wanted to survive yourself. The world was too much for the feeble man without their help. Indeed, the rich now have the luxury of relying on "corporations" to stand in for where children were once necessary. But then you're ultimately back to square one: Why should you love, guard, bring up, and watch the corporations?
There is no free lunch. You are going to put in the effort either way, but at least children might also provide some happiness along the way. The "corporations" seem to just draw ire. We didn't recognize that for a long time, but I do see a shift starting to take place.
Housing and transportation continue to dominate American household budget.
Now, I did read that somebody suggesting that it's not cost but density that reduces population fertility. I would wonder if that just means we need to provide more spaces for families within cities.
Children are resilient. Hell, we've raised children through terrible wars and famines. Being born into a relatively peaceful era and the wealthiest time in history is about as stable as it gets.
You may have a point that potential parents are putting pressure on themselves to be the perfect soccer mom and dads, carting their kids around in their Escalades, and then returning home to sleep in their mansions, and if they end up anywhere short of that they are not worthy of having children. But that's just part of the fashion du jour. Children don't need or even care for any of that.
> I did read that somebody suggesting that it's not cost but density that reduces population fertility.
I don't think anyone would seriously suggest that cost is a factor. Sure, there is that study that suggests it costs ~$10,000-20,000+ per year to raise a child, but when you look closely the cost is for things like buying a bigger house. You don't need a bigger house to raise children. Look at what American settlers raised children in: Tiny, single room log cabins. And they had, on average, eight children living in them!
The density suggestion is interesting, although I'm not sure it tracks. For example, the least dense US states, Maine and Vermont with only ~35% urbanization, have lower fertility than New York and California with ~90% urbanization. I expect what was noticed is merely correlationary as urbanization and the general ability to opt to not have children are both not realistic until a society reaches a certain level of wealth. In other words, the societies that are rich enough to opt to have few children are also more likely to be urbanized.
But humans are social creatures. And it hasn't been socially acceptable to have children in the modern age, at least not until you are into your 30s, at which point go ahead, society gives the green light (It will even start to cry: "Why haven't you had children yet???") – but by then, good luck having more than approximately one child before biology puts an end to the party.
The latter is often closely tied to the former. When things get rough, things can get ugly. Tensions build and emotions run hot which at best makes for a less-than-stellar environment for kids to grow up in and at worst can lead to violence or divorce. Many young adults experienced this first hand in their childhood and want to avoid inflicting these situations on any potential children of their own.
As such, a lot of people who’d otherwise be parents have held out because they fear these scenarios playing out. For most, the goal probably isn’t to be perfect or raise their children in the lap of luxury, but simply to wait until they’re reasonably confident that they’ve precluded financial disaster for the most part and that hardship and struggle won’t be commonplace.
I don’t think that’s bad or wrong, and in fact I feel is thoughtful and responsible. With all this in mind, if an individual or group wants to look at turning around birth rate numbers, they would do well to address the issues that prevent young adults from feeling financially secure in this way.
I've grown convinced people are overwhelmingly an asset. In a rough sense that means they/we produce more value than they consume on average.
I think debates about population size are mostly really about this difference.
The "debate" for many people is whether this simplistic economic model can be used at all. They say that value is multi-dimensional, and those value dimensions are not fungible. Concretely, if making a medicine factory results in the extinction of a specie, you can't say that it is okay, because the benefit of the former is incomparable to the loss of the latter.
Coming to population, more humans mean more destruction of ecosystems. And it is not clear whether destroying ecosystems can be fungibly compared to the additional human economic value those extra humans create. It's not about more or less, it the incomparability of the two.
[1] but not necessarily what you meant
[2] Just to be clear, the economics discipline already has a wealth of research that humans cannot in fact consistently assign absolute or relative dollar values to the same thing. Yet our political-economy and popular conceptions have this as a central assumption.
This argues against something I didn't say and don't believe.
And we went from 1 billion to 2 billion to 8 billion very very fast. The burdens are really piling up.
It’s not the number of humans, it’s the age distribution of those humans + where they live.
Put another way: you can “feel” like the world needs fewer people, but you’re probably not going to like what your world looks like when that desire comes true.
Pensions is a big one, another one is care for elders.
It's not a problem if we had eased up to say 1 billion and stayed there, but the rate of change is quite abrupt.
And it is very, very ,very clear this is a horribly stupid and shortsighted thing to do. It is simply impossible to have constant growth, clearly it is unsustainable.
The system HAS to change. It might be from a slow and steady decline, or it might be a very abrupt change, but it's going to change one way or another.
Assuming we only get this planet though, I suppose it couldn't've gone like this forever haha.
Further, people alive in 2300 will be decedents of people who chose to have kids generation after generation despite living in an industrialized environment. That self selection both in terms of DNA and culture means a population bounce back becomes increasingly likely over time especially as fewer people means less pollution and less competition for resources.
Humanity might even end up cycling through industrialization, collapse, hunter gatherers, agriculture, industrialization, multiple times before settling on some stable equilibrium. You just can’t extrapolate exponential curves indefinitely when they depend on the population size.
TBH if I never existed by definition I would be fine with it, you know, since I don't exist and was never born. I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV, since the optimal solution seems relentless expansionism like a virus.
I do, because second-person collectively-singular Humanity is a living thing all its own, and the more humans there are the more alive We are. Your argument is the anthropological equivalent of “640K ought to be enough for anybody”.
To be fair, that does appear to be happening, if slowly. The largest financial drain on young people, college, has shown decline over the past several years. There is still a lot of social entrenchment to overcome, though; like trying to convince marriage hopefuls that they don't need to buy an expensive diamond.
The real problem is the transition period where there are more unproductive people than not, because the stock of existing people is still here. That's why a crashing population is bad.
If this is the case, even a steady state would mean a lowered standard of living.
It's hard to know, as our societies have decided to reduce costs on the front end (lowered birth rate) rather than on the back end (decreased longevity). That's understandable as someone who is never born doesn't suffer, but it's the worse solution from a social maintenance standpoint.
I'm not saying we need less population at present.
I'm just saying that at some point the cost outweighs the benefit. And humanity has been trying pretty hard to go toward that point.
Do you really think it will always, always be better to have more people? If you say no to this, then you don't get to say we're on different sides of the line. If you say yes, then you need to explain how that's physically possible.
Not that there is anything wrong with disagreeing with me on this.
Two point as a taste:
1. One way more people is always better is in invention. Ten billon heads invent more than one.
2. People always worry that with more people there will be food shortage. They are also always empirically wrong. Because food is made by people! Twice as many people means twice as many farmers!
I don't think we even have a way to put one billion people to work on optimized farms. More labor won't lead to more full mouths.
As an example of costs catching up, going from 20% of land to 30% of land needing to be optimized farms used to feed people directly? That's easy enough, and those numbers would support more people than we have today. Going from 80% to 90%, however, is extremely worrying. And we could go from the former to the latter and past it very fast too.
Economics never prevents having children. As before, only the rich even get the luxury of choosing to not have children. But the rich could have children too if they so choose. Their fear of children making them look poor under the whims of today's fashion is an entirely self-imposed limitation.
Good for them if that's what they want to do. No judgment on anyone's personal life choices. But I maintain that an increasing number of people are starting to question if that is what is right for them. I agree that what is right for an individual is not universal. Some people will truly not want children, but many more feel pressured to not have children due to the prevailing fashion trends. I see change afoot among the latter group. Having children is slowly starting to become "cool" again.
I'm not sure how you could. The sentiment is only just starting to change as far as I can tell. It is too late for the current crop of young-ish adults. But I don't see the next generation, of what generation there is, coming up in the same environment where having children is demonized and seen as something reserved for the poor. For them, I fully expect having children will be the display of wealth; the "cool" thing to do.
We see over and over and over again that the rich use their resources to set themselves apart from the poor in some way and then the poor try everything they can to emulate them. It is a tale as old as time. In this instance we saw the rich start to afford the luxury to choose to have children, and poorer people have been on the quest to copy them ever since. But now we're nearing a critical mass where the world has become rich enough that even the poorest people are now able to start thinking about foregoing having children. That signals that the current fashion trend is on the outs.
I'm starting to see a shift towards "Look at how rich I am. I can afford to have children and you can't!" You even alluded to that same shift in a previous comment, so it seems you're seeing it too. And we should expect something of the sort as it is the natural progression of fashion.
Similarly higher population isn't a good in of itself. It seems to me that there's much less evidence that there's something that needs higher population.
I don't see how higher population necessarily makes humanity as a collective organism more human. That seems like saying that an individual human is more human if they weigh more.
Try ketamine some time with good sensory deprivation — comfy bed, silk sleep mask, ear plugs :)
In your world governments forceably breed humans like chickens in massive factory farms churning out people to the carrying capacity of the planet. I don't want to live there and I sure as hell don't find it moral.
The whole point is that if you accept the fact that expanding population is good a priori, this leads to stupid conclusions by the tyranny of exponential growth. Who cares if the average person is a slave when you have several hundred billion of them. Who cares if mothers die horribly after being forced to carry child after child.
Personally I think the only consistent viewpoint is some form of logarithmic population * average well being metric to measure utility. From that perspective, I have no clue how a policy maker should act today. Hopefully smarter minds than mine figure it out!
Maybe if you're evil enough to not care about any individual human's quality of life. Is there a word for the logical fallacy where you argue against the most absurd possible interpretation of a person's beliefs in order to feel no guilt for disregarding them?
This is the standard issue with any aggregate utilitarianism theories of morality.
https://utilitarianism.net/population-ethics/
It's a stupid idea that's been soundly rejected because it posits arbitrarily bad living conditions since "anything" is better than nothing.