I think eugenicists often fall into the trap of thinking more younger women giving birth might be net negative because of the negative IQ correlation associated with younger births/teen pregnancies. The reality of more births to younger women in a declining population is that you get more births of high IQ people overall at the possible expense of a couple IQ points per century or half century. Meanwhile you also get to offset some of the population decline. Seems clearly worth it to me. After all, as you point out, the looming pension crisis seems nigh-unsolvable without ASI.
Aging populations will demand a lot of resources for the young. You note this is bad but not third-world immigration bad. But I think it might be: because intelligence decreaes with age. You have half a population whose intelligence will decline by a standard deviation and you have the equivalent of millions of African-Americans--except need even more health support. This will simpyl stagnate and recess societies.
What do you think about Robin Hanson's claim that shrinking population willead to technological regression? (via the claimed mechanism that current technology depends on economies of scale which will no longer be profitable)
Or of the pronatalist talking point that the real demographic change won't be white -> nonwhite, it's non-amish -> Amish?
I'm not sure of these myself. It does seem like the Collinses are right that fertility is falling everywhere, and even Africa will be be sub-replacement in a generation or two. And it's hard to see how even a strongly pronatalist religious/cultural turn would lead to outbreeding the Amish, who are by now genetically selected for disliking and avoiding most of the features of modernity that lead to lower birth rates.
Seems plausible. Overall, dark ages are inevitable, in fact modernity is probably too unstable to Last long. Modernity collapse will sélect for religious, provincial People against city, cosmopolite life. But we will have a slow, painful death of modernity that will Last a century or two.
The problem is we haven't seen any population stabilizing yet. South Korea's rate continues to fall without pulling up.
The second issue is when you drastically drop the population too fast pillars of the economy fall. Distribution of labour- is broken, people have to start working multiple jobs less efficiently. We can already see it manifesting in salaries in certain blue collar jobs skyrocket due to all the old pros retiring. Someone who would otherwise work some other job eg. a good teacher will be incentivised to retrain. In turn causing a teaching shortage. Imagine this on a big scale and you can see how the economy shrinks.
In population collapses before there's been a second wave where the fallen economy creates famines and makes everyone too poor to have children for a long time. We have the tech for food now but the chaos of the contraction could be terrible. There's a hope that AI will allow us to avoid it.
How do you view the relationship between K- and r-strategist approaches in terms of human demographic patterns, particularly in the context of declining birth rates, population density, and immigration? Do you see these ecological strategies as a useful framework for understanding these demographic challenges?
I think eugenicists often fall into the trap of thinking more younger women giving birth might be net negative because of the negative IQ correlation associated with younger births/teen pregnancies. The reality of more births to younger women in a declining population is that you get more births of high IQ people overall at the possible expense of a couple IQ points per century or half century. Meanwhile you also get to offset some of the population decline. Seems clearly worth it to me. After all, as you point out, the looming pension crisis seems nigh-unsolvable without ASI.
Aging populations will demand a lot of resources for the young. You note this is bad but not third-world immigration bad. But I think it might be: because intelligence decreaes with age. You have half a population whose intelligence will decline by a standard deviation and you have the equivalent of millions of African-Americans--except need even more health support. This will simpyl stagnate and recess societies.
What do you think about Robin Hanson's claim that shrinking population willead to technological regression? (via the claimed mechanism that current technology depends on economies of scale which will no longer be profitable)
Or of the pronatalist talking point that the real demographic change won't be white -> nonwhite, it's non-amish -> Amish?
I'm not sure of these myself. It does seem like the Collinses are right that fertility is falling everywhere, and even Africa will be be sub-replacement in a generation or two. And it's hard to see how even a strongly pronatalist religious/cultural turn would lead to outbreeding the Amish, who are by now genetically selected for disliking and avoiding most of the features of modernity that lead to lower birth rates.
Seems plausible. Overall, dark ages are inevitable, in fact modernity is probably too unstable to Last long. Modernity collapse will sélect for religious, provincial People against city, cosmopolite life. But we will have a slow, painful death of modernity that will Last a century or two.
The problem is we haven't seen any population stabilizing yet. South Korea's rate continues to fall without pulling up.
The second issue is when you drastically drop the population too fast pillars of the economy fall. Distribution of labour- is broken, people have to start working multiple jobs less efficiently. We can already see it manifesting in salaries in certain blue collar jobs skyrocket due to all the old pros retiring. Someone who would otherwise work some other job eg. a good teacher will be incentivised to retrain. In turn causing a teaching shortage. Imagine this on a big scale and you can see how the economy shrinks.
In population collapses before there's been a second wave where the fallen economy creates famines and makes everyone too poor to have children for a long time. We have the tech for food now but the chaos of the contraction could be terrible. There's a hope that AI will allow us to avoid it.
How do you view the relationship between K- and r-strategist approaches in terms of human demographic patterns, particularly in the context of declining birth rates, population density, and immigration? Do you see these ecological strategies as a useful framework for understanding these demographic challenges?