Yours truly & Sir Kenaz were joined by the Eminent Sir Constantin to speak about how the EU Vassals are coping & seething after Vice President Vance’s Valentine’s Day Munich Speech, which amounted to an Emperor violently whipping a disobedient Government 🫏… Enjoy, Dear Listeners! 😘 😉
When people get poorer, they have fewer babies, and no amount of propaganda will change that. Yes, perfectly ordinary people can in fact tell when they become poorer, no matter how many NYT or Pravda editorials to the contrary economists or propagandists (not that there's much of a difference between the two) may write. Look at the former Eastern Block. The 1990s happened and birth rates tanked. You think it was anti-natalist propaganda? Puh-leez. People got poorer, they had fewer babies. And yes, increasing standards of living do partially (but only partially) reverse the trend. Just take a look at the charts.
For most of human history, the rich had lots of children while the poor had *some* children, the majority of whom died to diseases & other factors like natural calamities & whatnot.
This 300 year period we are in is very anomalous. The poor have had more children than the rich thanks to advances in medicine and related factors… but as the demographic transition hits, coupled with less resources, coupled with value shifts and whatnot…
We are going back to many preindustrial trends. I have no doubt in my mind (for example) that only about 50-100 million people will exist worldwide in 3025 CE, at the bottom and end of this 1,000 year Dark Age and Deindustrial Twilight.
Afterward things may begin to pick up… but that’s quite a few years away 😊
Agreed with the first two paragraphs. As for the third: eh, too specific. Where did the 50-100M number come from? Why not 10M or 1B? Certainly there will be a lot fewer people than there are today, though. But anyway, as people have to do with fewer resources per capita, there will be fewer babies. Perhaps as people re-ruralize, that will reverse, but that'll come with an increase in infant mortality, and so it's not clear that people will be successfully raising more children to adulthood.
You don't know bio capacity in advance. Humans have done a lot of damage to the systems that sustain them (us). But some knowledge has been gained, too. The actual carrying capacity may be higher *or* lower than it was in the past. In any case, historic population numbers are largely speculative, aren't they?
You can calculate biocapacity per person available quite easily using the methodology of William E Reese and other pioneers of the Ecological footprint and related concepts.
Historical population numbers have some wiggle room… but the confidence interval is “good enough” for use in most data sets. We don’t know for example whether there was *exactly* a few hundred thousand people in Oceania a few millennia ago… but that’s roughly correct and that’s perfectly acceptable to do arithmetic.
At an extreme end, the human carrying capacity may turn out to be zero (if climate change gets bad enough, for example). This strikes me as unlikely, but the point is, as you degrade the systems you depend on for survival, your carrying capacity does not just stay flat. Will those systems recover? Possibly. To what extent? I don't know.
Lol , loved the German Democratic Republic reference at the end ! 😂
Perhaps you can guess why .
I live in a rural area , internet is slow , so not in the habit of listening to podcasts.
But this one is always a pleasure.
The pleasure is all ours... Thank You, Good Sir, for being a Listener!
Yours truly & Sir Kenaz were joined by the Eminent Sir Constantin to speak about how the EU Vassals are coping & seething after Vice President Vance’s Valentine’s Day Munich Speech, which amounted to an Emperor violently whipping a disobedient Government 🫏… Enjoy, Dear Listeners! 😘 😉
When people get poorer, they have fewer babies, and no amount of propaganda will change that. Yes, perfectly ordinary people can in fact tell when they become poorer, no matter how many NYT or Pravda editorials to the contrary economists or propagandists (not that there's much of a difference between the two) may write. Look at the former Eastern Block. The 1990s happened and birth rates tanked. You think it was anti-natalist propaganda? Puh-leez. People got poorer, they had fewer babies. And yes, increasing standards of living do partially (but only partially) reverse the trend. Just take a look at the charts.
For most of human history, the rich had lots of children while the poor had *some* children, the majority of whom died to diseases & other factors like natural calamities & whatnot.
This 300 year period we are in is very anomalous. The poor have had more children than the rich thanks to advances in medicine and related factors… but as the demographic transition hits, coupled with less resources, coupled with value shifts and whatnot…
We are going back to many preindustrial trends. I have no doubt in my mind (for example) that only about 50-100 million people will exist worldwide in 3025 CE, at the bottom and end of this 1,000 year Dark Age and Deindustrial Twilight.
Afterward things may begin to pick up… but that’s quite a few years away 😊
Agreed with the first two paragraphs. As for the third: eh, too specific. Where did the 50-100M number come from? Why not 10M or 1B? Certainly there will be a lot fewer people than there are today, though. But anyway, as people have to do with fewer resources per capita, there will be fewer babies. Perhaps as people re-ruralize, that will reverse, but that'll come with an increase in infant mortality, and so it's not clear that people will be successfully raising more children to adulthood.
Energy per capita considerations in a post industrial world, where people use traditional biomass coupled with some lower tech renewable methods.
The 50-100 million number is what you get once you calculate energy usage per capita, then factor in available bio capacity per person.
You don't know bio capacity in advance. Humans have done a lot of damage to the systems that sustain them (us). But some knowledge has been gained, too. The actual carrying capacity may be higher *or* lower than it was in the past. In any case, historic population numbers are largely speculative, aren't they?
You can calculate biocapacity per person available quite easily using the methodology of William E Reese and other pioneers of the Ecological footprint and related concepts.
Historical population numbers have some wiggle room… but the confidence interval is “good enough” for use in most data sets. We don’t know for example whether there was *exactly* a few hundred thousand people in Oceania a few millennia ago… but that’s roughly correct and that’s perfectly acceptable to do arithmetic.
At an extreme end, the human carrying capacity may turn out to be zero (if climate change gets bad enough, for example). This strikes me as unlikely, but the point is, as you degrade the systems you depend on for survival, your carrying capacity does not just stay flat. Will those systems recover? Possibly. To what extent? I don't know.