Exactly. Perhaps one of the biggest barriers slowing down solutions to problems caused by demographic collapse = people not being willing to discuss demographic collapse merely because some racist/religiously extreme groups refer to demographic shifts in some of their arguments.
Just because hitler self-identified as a vegetarian doesn't mean that other people who self-identify as vegetarians condone Hitler's views.
Something like this needs trigger warnings. That's a way to start breaking down those barriers. People won't engage seriously unless they're presented with something seems a little less like stealth hate speech.
There is nothing to embellish or present. When the numbers are still going up it's obvious that the person complaining or being concerned only has their stance because they think they are going up in the wrong places.
It's better not to embellish , at least DJT was honest and didn't try to pretend he said something else.
That's an entirely valid point. We'll seriously consider taking it out. It provides an interesting case study and allows for some interesting conjecture, but it certainly isn't core to the arguments we hope to make and its lack of credibility probably does more harm than good to our overall arguments.
This is NOT a view expressed in the document (nor is it a view held by its authors).
One of the key risks this document highlights is the risk that many populations, which contribute helpful diversity and different perspectives to the world, go extinct before people find a way to sustain them (e.g. Koreans, Japanese, Jains, Parsi, Emirates, Tanka, Macanese, Taiwanese, Italians, etc.).
This is not about "I want the 'good' people to reproduce and the 'bad' people to stop;" this is about raising awareness of various implications of population decline, which affect not just cultural/ethnic diversity, but also the viability of many major cities, stock markets, and governing formats.
I was not replying to the document, but to catchclose8919's comment where he advocated "handing extra child care support to educated people in helthy societies and contraception to the others."
"Handling contraception" is almost zero cost (so can even be done in bad economie where stuff like child support can't work) and is about choice, not forcing anyone to do anything!
If you want to play the "contraception is eugenics" card, have fun with whatever ultra-cristian uneducated mid-american audience you find for that...
While this argument makes intuitive/emotional sense, it's not the case that humans start having more kids once they can finally "chill t f out"—though I totally understand where you're coming from.
In practice, populations in actual hypercompetitive hellholes, where they're not just competing for a job/status/basic financial solvency, but literally for their food security, physical safety, etc., are those which are having more kids.
The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.
All that said, we are not arguing in favor of making life more stressful for any group, be they in developed nations or nations facing severe hardship. We're simply pointing out that "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates.
> populations in actual hypercompetitive hellholes, where they're not just competing for a job/status/basic financial solvency, but literally for their food security, physical safety, etc., are those which are having more kids
That's the problem we should solve. We don't want just "more children". We want "more children in the environments where there are resources available for their proper development". The "more children" in places like you describe problem is currently solved by more polytical instability, more war, more disease etc..
> "make raising kids cheaper/easier" and "make life easier" are not interventions proven to boost birth rates
Nothing's proven until you run an experiment to f prove it! You're the perfect example of "thinking prfoundly, but in the wrong direction" - under the whole flawed paradigm of "social science" you take the problems to be solved as "implacable natural tendencies" and from this you build flawed arguments against why the actual problems to be solved "can't be solved".
> The pretty-much-universal trend appears to be that once people become more educated and comfortable, they stop having kids above repopulation rate.
That's the freakin problem you need to solve, not a "trend" to placidly observe. We need to run experiments on multiple ways to alter/reverse this human behavior that's not natural but a product of the nasty society we've build for ourselves. OK, it was a price for a faster evolution towards post-industrial stage, but now we can tweak it and adjust the externalities.
We might want to start with the fact that people are rarely "educated and comfortable". Education often makes people slaves of social-loops where they need to work harder to keep the higher status they've got used to and so on. Most higher educated people are more stressed and less happy than lower education people. We need to give people stuff like "job tenures" etc. to create stability - the lower class people actually have this stability by virtue of being "rock bottom", eg. "it's hard to fall any lower down the social ladder, so at least you can lay back and feel good and comfy about it, with whatever rationalizations you can concoct, then start having some kids to get a feel of meaning in life, yey!".
We need to think active social engineering not passive social-"science". We've sold ourselved a bunch of feel good stories about "how things are" in our "society", instead of realizing that society is nothing but a mechanism with thousands of levers we can start tweaking until we get better outcomes...
When creating this document, our goal wasn't to give people the impression that our populations should expand in number indefinitely (especially not on Earth alone). You're right that expecting the planet to shoulder indefinite population growth is impractical.
We're just trying to highlight the hazards of population decline that hits humanity like a tidal wave and produces unnecessary suffering and damage. There are ways for populations to sustainably decline without wiping out entire cultures, for example.
We, personally, care a lot about memetic/cultural diversity and worry that a population collapse for which we don't prepare will eliminate loads of perspectives that would otherwise contribute great new innovations and technologies to humanity's future.
We also think it's important that people know that population decline will affect certain fundamentals upon which their lives are based (e.g. "I put all my retirement savings in the stock market because on average the stock market always goes up" isn't going to be a healthy thought when population decline accelerates).
I'm happy to hear that the overall perspective is relatable and sober although I can not agree on 'tidal wave' and 'apocalypse'. 'Antideluge' or 'negative tsunami', anyone?
You know, you could even blame Russia's current war on its declining population (their leader desperately trying to keep together the country and the people) but I know of another Great War that was fought under the pretense of having the right to expand b/c of a growing population (and they happened to have laid their eyes on the same stretches of fertile farmland). I do not believe in either, the reasons being in both cases largely unrelated to demographic growth or lack thereof. Given that this former event did cause stocks to take a plunge, well, that's what trouble and disorder give you, trouble and disorder. And that can have so many reasons that I'm not afraid of the shrinking population => economic setback linkage, even if and so far as it does have predictive value.
This is one of the reasons why we put together this document. We (as authors) see there being many benefits to smaller human populations on earth, but we think that any transition made needs to be made very thoughtfully.
So far we we can see, there is very little (effective) proactive action being taken to ensure that as population levels decline, things we value (like technological progress, women's rights, diversity of cultures, etc.) are protected.
We address this somewhat in the document. It seems the effect affordable childcare has is more limited than one would hope, though it certainly helps!
That said, having kids above repopulation rate might not just be about making things affordable. If people don't have a strong reason to have more than two kids, and if kids don't have tactical value like they did when they contributed to the family business (e.g. did farm labor, helped around a household, provided old-age care), then it can be difficult to justify having more than two even if raising kids is totally cost neutral (simply because it's more complicated to have a larger family—more of a logistical and mental burden).
This is definitely one view—and it's totally valid. We put together this document for those who are concerned about the implications of some mass extinction (e.g. that populations that survive the mass extinction are far less likely to be gender egalitarian, so it may be that groups who want to protect women's rights over the long run will care more while groups optimizing for other things will care less).
Totally agreed that the implications of population shifts warrant investigation. Demographic changes have significant impacts on variety of factors—even if one ONLY cares about maximizing investment gains, it's an important subject.
The fact that "Declining birthrates alarmists are essentially sponsoring the great replacement theory" is one of the reasons we put together this document.
Demographic collapse as a risk (and related risks related to declining populations) deserves to be explored from a non-racially/religiously motivated angle. Just because some racially/religiously motivated groups care about a problem does not mean that everyone who cares about that problem is racially/religiously motivated.
We also don't argue in the document that people should NOT be having kids in certain countries, nor do we argue that certain groups should not have so many kids. We don't even argue that people in general should have more kids (having kids is not for everyone). We merely attempt to take a sober approach to issues around population decline and potential solutions.
We do think that demographic collapse can be "an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale." There was, admittedly, internal debate about using alarmist language in the title, though, and we appreciate the criticism (everything in this document is subject to change based on feedback).
We care about what happens to humanity after we die. We acknowledge that not everyone does. No judgment there. This document is more relevant to people who care about what happens to humans beyond their own personal lifespans.
Just because hitler self-identified as a vegetarian doesn't mean that other people who self-identify as vegetarians condone Hitler's views.