[catchclose8919]

...maybe if didn't work so hard to make our socity into a hypercompetitive hellhole intelligent and educated people would also start having more children! Give people guranteed free life-time education from daycare to university + some standard of free universal healthcare (sure, you'll have to pay for your antiaging, but not for a broken leg!) and more people will enjoy having more children. Maybe engineer the world so that people who choose to "chill t f out" can still enjoy both wealth and security because we do generate surplus value no matter what some people want to make you think. Just prevent some people from overconsuming at the same time that we prevent other from overproducing and give social climbing advantages to less competitive and workaholic people.

One reason why I'm 100% for a mildly-socialistic world government thinggy putting some brakes on mindless growth and eavening things out - handing extra child care support to educated people in helthy societies and contraception to the others. Instead we have a global kabal that manufactures scarcity all over the place, and wars in some even less lucky places, and instead of family planning we have... wars, disease & famine. No idea why we've made these tradeoffs as a species!

Some of the "economical and technological growth" in our societies and economies is really not the right kind of growt (it's more like "cancerous growth"), and some mild redistribution plus hitting the breaks a bit would allow for a more thoughtful type of development so that we can handle safely the transmission of human intelligence and values to bio-humanity's descendents when that comes sooner or later...

[sim1collins]

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.

[catchclose8919]

> 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...

[simonsarris]

> ...maybe if didn't work so hard to make our socity into a hypercompetitive hellhole intelligent and educated people would also start having more children!

If they're so educated and intelligent, why don't they opt out of that?

[catchclose8919]

...bc (1) educated != intelligent, and (2) intelligence is highly multidimensional, maybe the "dumb" people are the ones more intelligent in the dimension of intelligence requiring to "figure out they should opt out".

Also, in general very vey few people are "meta-socially intelligent" and the few that are are semi-psychopaths in positions of power so they probably enjoy the hell out of riding this hellish social machine.

[jtbayly]

Ah yes, the old “More from the fit, less from the unfit” view of reproduction. Where “fit” of course is “like me.” There’s a long history of this sort of eugenics.

[catchclose8919]

It's eugenics when you force it. It's social engineering when you alter the incentives/rewards landscape to get better outcomes. And it's... evolution when nature does it anyway.

Just labeling it as generically "bad" and charicaturising it in a way that bundles it with other despicable tendencies like maybe racism brings no insight to the discussion. Only muddies the waters and makes the whole discussion stupider.

[sim1collins]

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.

[DonnyV]

100% what this guy said ^^^