Quietly, and largely without notice, the bottom is dropping out on us as a species. On this one we could learn something from rabbits.
Humans
are having fewer children, and in much of the world the birthrate has fallen
below the level necessary to replace the existing population. That matters
because our economic systems were built on the assumption that there would
always be another generation coming along behind us. Retirement systems,
pensions, health care, tax bases and much of the ordinary machinery of commerce
depend upon a sufficiently large working population supporting a smaller
retired population. As the proportion of old people grows and the proportion of
working-age people shrinks, the arithmetic gets progressively less friendly.
We
can compensate with immigration, automation, increased productivity and people
working longer, but none of these changes the basic arithmetic. Fewer people
eventually means fewer workers, fewer consumers and fewer people available to
do the work. The United Nations projects that the world's population will peak
at roughly 10.3 billion in the 2080s and then decline. Rabbits, meanwhile,
appear to have avoided the problem entirely. They just keep making more
rabbits.
I
have posted a very short but powerful video offering one man’s explanation for
at least part of the reason this is occurring.
I had a conversation with Grok on this subject about a year ago. My concern with the declining birth rate is we may not be able to recover no matter what the government, society, or religious institutions try to do. On of the items I pointed out to Grok was the large number of men, 22% according to Grok, who have had vasectomies. They will never have more children no matter how sexy the women, the monetary incentives, or the societal shaming heaped on them. Women are slowly finding out they are not the only part of the partnership controlling conception. You might point to the fact that most of these men are beyond the normal child rearing age, but in the case of societal collapse we will all be called upon to give our part. And who’s to say that the ones with the most desirable DNA are the very ones who can’t?
ReplyDeleteYou bring up an interesting aspect about all of this: the impact on DNA. Jeez, now I will need to think about that.
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