Unfortunately, we are where we are. The consequences of the sin of over-procreation are already living among us. Great if we can figure a good path going forward, but we have to make it past here first. Or figure out time travel.
For example, China's draconian one child per couple rule is going to result in some pretty horrible demographics -- too many old people not enough people in the productive parts of their lives to support them (and as a side issue, lousy male/female ratios now). That is, as soon as their medicine and general health improves so that people get old there. Japan already has this problem. It was one of the first things CIA taught me as an analyst when trying to predict the future. In essence, if you assume that age 18 (pick some number you like) is when people enter the workforce, then you know how many will enter the workforce for the next 17 years -- they've all been born already, all people are (currently) born at age 0. So, while reproduction rates are going down, in some places they actually went down so fast as to cause issues down the line. The CIA used to build some nice bar charts to show this. You divide a central vertical axis into age-cohorts, say ten year age spans, and then plot the number of males on one side for each age cohort as bars, the number of females on the other side as bars if you bother to distinguish -- makes more difference in some cultures than others. In ours, not so much. All feminism has really accomplished in our society is now both parties in a marriage have to work to get the same standard of living we used to get with just one working.
At the bottom, you have "takers" -- children who don't contribute productively to society (unless you count joy in their parents and maybe others, but I'm doing the dismal science here)
The middle -- where all the "makers" reside, and of course, also some takers and fakers -- all too many of the latter these days.
The top - like the bottoms, not makers anymore (mostly) but takers who need care from others to survive, just like at the bottom.
Study of demographics of various countries is most illuminating about the future they will experience, economically and otherwise. Some countries, like those currently "hot" in the MENA regions, look like pyramids -- bottom heavy -- imbalance toward hot headed people in their 20's. Some, like Japan, are top heavy. America has a big bulge near the top - baby boomers getting ready to leave the workforce. This has implications for investing, by the way. As well as for our entitlement programs, and it's not like that data hasn't been available to our supposed planners for quite a long time -- they chose to ignore any inconvenient data.
The thing is, no way exists to change these shapes short of violence or pestilence -- neither of which I'll assume is acceptable as a solution. We can't ship people off to a new land, there is none anymore. That's "what's different this time".
In unstable countries or dictatorships (eg about 90% of UN membership) pretty much the only way for a person to guarantee they can EVER retire is to have enough kids to care for them then -- and enough have to survive to do it, so extra kids are spawned to overcome the loss rates, which tend to be high in those sorts of places. However, as we attempt to help these people out, and increase the child survival rate, they don't adapt to this fact, and still have lots of kids.
The main determinant of reproduction rate is wealth. In a paradoxical response, the wealthier a people, the less kids they tend to have so they can have more luxuries for themselves.
In a poor society, kids
are your wealth -- slaves, in effect.
Education tends to track wealth, or did until not too long ago. Now it seems to me that I learned more in high school than most PhD's I've met know -- even in their specialties sometimes.
I suppose though that it's always been that some learn and some don't and that it's not that correlated with a piece of paper from a for-profit institution, but it seems to me many teachers don't know their subjects like they used to. It was a good high school, I admit. My first two years of college were a breeze as I'd already learned all the maths, inorganic chemistry, and was already an electrical engineer (taught by my Dad) by the time I began.
Further, as western medicine makes people live longer, we don't increase the retirement age to match.
I agree -- when we try to predict the far future, it's pretty uncertain, the farther ahead, the more uncertain it is. One reason I tend to do shorter term trading -- like linear prediction or the fancier neural networks I do better with shorter term predictions -- less risk of a game changing event creeping into shorter term horizons. On the other hand I see the most ridiculous things on your average science boards in the comments about blind faith in science without enough understanding to realize how dumb that can be.
Example: we know the entire periodic table, and that it's highly unlikely that super heavy stable elements with interesting new electron configurations exist. Period
No holes in there. Chemistry in some sense is "done". Yet people still project that chemical batteries will increase in capacity forever. I won't dispute that some energy storage device might come along better than chemical batteries -- I can't know that answer just now, but if it does -- it won't be chemical, it will be something else, because once you have lithium and fluorine, you're at the most electro-positive and electronegative two elements that exist. Period. Stick a fork in it, it's done.
Batteries now are already at an energy density level roughly the same as high explosives; something that's received a lot more research dollars, actually. Any country knows that the most expensive military is the one that doesn't win (just as with lawyers), and if you've not studied history, you'd be real surprised how many famous scientists did stints with their local defense department -- Newton comes to mind, with calculus being used to calculate trajectories of cannon balls -- only after that did it help out in other areas. But he's just one example, and there are many-many more. Archimedes on up to Fermi.
I even did my stint, in my case, in the "intelligence community" but that's part of the same outfit. Mostly we tried to prevent fights and were sometimes successful at it.
I agree it would be nice if we'd all quit fighting one another, but that doesn't solve as much as you'd think on a simple analysis. Our DOD spends roughly 60% of its money on get this -- pensions and health benefits to people already retired. You can't just turn that off by not fighting -- and the ripple effects on the economy have to be taken into account for any such major change. The trouble is, we have human nature to contend with, and humans fight, lie, cheat, steal, murder, and all try to be at the top of the pyramid where there's not so much room for them all. We are not dealing with angels except the exceptions, which are few. So any solution to problems has to take into account the material we are working with.
Here's the thing -- it's obvious that it would be nice to have controlled procreation at some level that would make the demographic charts work out better, no question -- but you have to do that at the right speed or create more problems and there might not be time for that. The truth is that some places have already gone too far the other way! It would also be nice if we could move up the retirement age so people were in that "maker" category longer, to compensate for the longer lives. But -- older people have diminishing productivity even when healthy physically. They know big parts of the game are bull, and refuse to play anymore. Their mental facilities diminish even if they can still run marathons. But even that isn't the kicker here. We no longer benefit so much from more man-hours put into things as we did. Machines do a lot of things just fine, and cheaper.
Automation and the Internet are the most deflationary inventions in all history. This wouldn't be a problem except -- how do we distribute the wealth? Now I'm a dyed in the wool conservative, I really believe that if you produce more, you ought to be rewarded more, stuff like that (I am NOT a republican, the very idea of any of our political parties makes me throw up a little in the back of my throat). It's a nice built in incentive for people to achieve and try harder, which I happen to believe also makes them happier, based on evidence I've collected over my lifetime. It has driven a few of my own life decisions as well. After doing a lot of "secret" stuff, then a lot of software stuff for embedded product with obscure uses, I realized that in my entire life I had almost nothing I could point to and show someone else -- "Hey, I did that! I made this thing of value that helps the world go around". Not that I hadn't created any value, just that it was hard to point to. So I embarked on this and other projects for the satisfaction of that. Note, I have no children - this IS my legacy, if any.
One can imagine, in a
reductio ad absurdum that at some point one big automated factory makes everything -- everything. No human work needed. The guy or company that owns that owns all the means of production. But they have no customers -- no one has a job, no one has money to buy that everything. Capitalism fails as a way to distribute wealth. Rats! I was kind of fond of it, myself -- and all implementations of all other systems really are capitalist at base, even in Soviet Russia when that existed. They failed as the Chinese kick butt economically because even inside a communist system, the Chinese embraced and encourage capitalism, where the Soviets tried to stamp it out, and failed, merely creating a black market and crony capitalism instead, which is less efficient, mostly.
We can actually see the beginnings of capitalism bumping up against this limit now, as things stagnate and mergers combine things, rather than innovation creating new markets. We can't even identify all that much new that humans want! So we fight over market share for the same old things, and the big boys, with economies of scale (and control of governments and power), win. A prime feature of most mergers is layoffs as "efficiencies and synergies are realized". Which points out that as things get more efficient, you don't need as many person hours to get all the production you can use happening. In fact, by most measures, productivity per person-hour is at all time highs, even with about 20% unemployment (the actual number, not the faked one). Could it be that companies were smart about who got the axe? I think so, from their standpoint.
So the "Star Trek" world is at least in theory, possible. But how to make the transition from here to there? Why would anyone build that giant factory, given human nature as it is, if there was no reward in it for them? It's already trying to happen. We just don't need all the human labor we have to make everything everyone needs or even mostly wants -- the only reason it might appear otherwise is that the third world isn't following along this path - yet. Dictatorships and corruption are wasteful enough to increase the demand for labor!
It seems to me, that all our problems boil down to human nature and the inherent flaws therein. No one is innocent, though some of us try pretty hard. As B.F. Skinner would point out, no one born with a stomach stays innocent long - the conditioning you get from that alone is enough to set you on a path for life, just like his pigeons.
As an erstwhile biblical scholar (long story, I was ordained once) -- I feel all too many people misinterpret that document to suit themselves. The "go forth and be fruitful" line has an obvious meaning at least to the people of the time. No one growing grapes or crops or an orchard would ever think that meant planting plants so close together that they can't be healthy - no it took modern "rationalization" for the Catholics (mostly) to come up with that one -- and to be a little cynical, to create more tithing members was surely the goal. Marriage was hardly touched on at all in the book -- because no one needed to write down what it was, everyone knew. Try finding out how to use a urinal in today's society -- same thing. We all just know so no one writes directions down.
I wasn't aware that outside the Catholics and a few small sects that Christians in general wanted 4+ kids. It's certainly not my experience that the ones I know do. But then most Christians haven't read the book, and certainly not tried to understand what it says in context (most would be in jail if they actually did, perhaps). Too lazy to be taught to think -- they want to be told what to think (which is one reason I quit teaching that stuff). And of course, plenty of people love telling other people what to think, which has devolved into some people's power over others using religion as the tool.
Science has many of the exact same issues, actually, or as CS Lewis said -- "when we go out to conquer nature, it's really the conquest of other men using nature as a tool" -- and he was a Christian writer, though that quote comes from some science fiction he wrote.
Underlying both is that crufty human-nature thing.
Other situations have other causes -- with no way to live beyond normal productive years, people in less advantaged countries use kids since they have no public dole to accomplish that one. And no one wants to die the minute they can't lift a bale of hay anymore. But sigh, man is a rationalizing animal, rather than a rational one. Stinks, but there it is. And human nature is relatively difficult to change, honestly -- and if you could force a change, well that's a pretty big responsibility (like eugenics) -- and who is wise enough to not have any unintended consequences, if you could do it anyway? Not I. It seems all that sort of help you can give someone has to be rather highly tailored or customized to the subject, one size just doesn't fit all.
For example, if you imagine heaven, nirvana, whatever, as being the top of some mountain, and we humans all around the base of it, you have one religion/philosophy yelling "go east" while another yells "go north". None are wise enough to say "climb the mountain" -- the only one size that would actually fit all. (which is one reason why I no longer practice the religion I was ordained in, among others)
I guess that approaches a problem-statement here. I learned the golden rule a long while back, but perhaps a different interpretation of it than most have. It can be stated:
Love your neighbor as you love yourself (old testament version)
Love your neighbor as I've loved you (new testament)
What goes around comes around (pagan).
Karma (Buddhism, and yes, I know that's not precisely correct, but close enough)
But everyone has this one in some form - the Dao, others, you name it. The thing is, all too many Christians believe that this is a law like we humans have, and some anthropomorphic old bearded god dude is going to slap you down if you don't obey, like the police, if you break a human law. But that's not how it seems to work out, actually.
The golden rule works out more like, if you make good things go around, then you create an environment where good things come around, it's just how the universe and humans in it work. If you hate people (or just don't care, like a sociopath), and are a thief, guess who you'll spend a lifetime hanging around with? No one good wants to be around you, and your misanthropic world view becomes self-fulfilling! It works the other way around too, as I've found out, to my considerable joy. Birds of a feather and all that -- some old sayings have more truth than is immediately evident sometimes.
I happen to believe there's no such thing as pure altruism (from a human)...there's a close substitute, which I call enlightened self-interest, golden rule based. Works nearly the same, but takes BF Skinner's work into account better. I think anyone who thinks they act purely from altruism is simply self-deceived, and maybe a bit vain.
So I guess I've started something here I can't finish -- if my statement of the problem is correct, there's no proximate answer but some magical all knowing benevolent and wise dictatorship. I'm sure there'd be plenty of applicants for that job, but I know of none worthy, now or from all of history. Otherwise, we'd need some magic "enlightenment pill" or substance we could put in the water, or something like the shoe shop enhancer ray described in hitchhikers guide to the galaxy -- and you'd still need someone to tell it what to say. That is in fact essentially what all flocks demand of all religious teachers -- a quick, painless way to enlightenment, preferably in pill form, or something else similarly simple to ingest. I know no humans, even wise ones with the best intentions (including me) I'd hand that power to willingly.
As a preacher, I found out why all the crap happens around famous preachers. You wouldn't
believe how people treat you. People in the flock with marital problems -- their wives come on to you (or the gay men, no difference, really). Bad men try to "buy" salvation and want help rationalizing they aren't actually bad so they can continue to be (and that's not just men). People want to become your slave (they call it something like disciple, but they mean slave as in "please take over my thinking for me"), to "buy salvation" in a way that seems more real to them -- but really messes them and you up. Its like being under constant attack, difficult to keep your moral compass. I admit -- I folded, that kitchen was just too hot for me - I got out before I got too corrupted. I got real tired of pious people who'd try to run you down in the parking lot as soon as church let out -- the wind him up on Sunday crowd, forget morality the rest of the time. That's human nature again, even when you help it along a better path, it's still pretty pathetic often as not.
Gee that sounds more misanthropic than I think I actually am. There's plenty of humans I think are pretty neat. It's just that as a group, not so much. I think someone said something like "a man is smart" but "a crowd is a herd, stupid, mean, uncontrollable, and vicious" or something like that. Heinlein perhaps?
The above interpretation has allowed me to see a lot of religious writing more as an "owners manual for man" rather than a list of rules you must obey or not get some reward post-life. If you look at even the ten commandments with this in mind, they make a lot more sense, actually -- they are a list of things to be aware of to be happy and do well NOW, in this life. No society does well if it's full of thieves, and not even they prosper after awhile. If you don't respect your parents, you don't learn their wisdom. And so forth. Not so much a "do this or else" as "this is how the playing field is laid out, and here's a winning strategy".
So, that was one very powerful attempt to "fix" human nature, and we see it hasn't panned out as well as we'd like. We can't know how much worse it would be had no attempt been made, of course. As another writer said "no one can ever know what
would have been".
A very good link on demographics that might not be around much longer. I was relieved to find it again so I didn't have to scan in the whole article I printed out at the time. Every now and then the finance people get a good one, though the analysis might not be right, here's the doggone data at least -- not sure how accurate it is but it points to "interesting times" ahead for various countries, and of course, to most, it will all be a surprise when it happens.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.