AIBU The global fertility crisis is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced?

[plantsdieinmyhouse]

We’re in a ‘global fertility crisis’.

I’m astounded that global (even UK/European) fertility decline to below the replacement rate of 2.1 (thought to have happened now) isn’t in the forefront of most people’s radar. There are barely even any politicians acknowledging it let alone devising policies to tackle it.

Thee are even people who still think we’re in the 70s/80s/90s and ‘overpopulation’ is still an issue.

Once everyone who’s alone now is dead the human race will be in terminal decline.

Nothing else matters if there’s none of us left!

Even on a personal level a large proportion of women don’t have the number of DCs they expect to.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/43a9bd63-25c9-4941-bc99-fc9f7e42c12a?shareToken=29bf27cb9dafe9af7a006bc25355e411

I haven't misunderstood anyone and I'm not sure why you even think I have...

It makes her feel better though so let her have it 😆

Plus the population proponents are forgetting that health care resources are also eaten up by pregnancy, birthing care and children's medical needs. If the resources are scarce we can't afford that either. We certainly wouldn't be able to afford to take care of all the millions of kids with ASD, ADHD and other disabilities, and I say that as someone who is on the spectrum and has a daughter with ADHD and cerebral palsy. So the scarce resources argument easily works both ways, which makes it a stupid argument for population growth and limiting health resources for the elderly. We have some of the same people who are callously proposing letting the elderly go without care squawking about people not caring about
suffering and death just because they are admitting that we messed up the planet and it would do better without us. Utter hypocrisy.

Uuurghhh...i should've walked away.

Nobody is arguing for population growth, as has been clarified repeatedly, so stop with the dishonesty.

People are advocating for a slower decline, instead of a cliff edge one - precisely because of what the former would mean for the social safety net.

You'd know that if you stopped to actually read what people were posting, instead of screaming and flailing about the inevitably of extinction via the climate crisis (despite the scientific consensus being that, while the climate crisis remains extremely serious, we have likely averted an apocalyptic level of warming).

We've missed our chance to achieve the best possible outcome, have averted the worst, and now its a fight to limit the severity of warming (on a scale of "pretty bad" to "very bad").

I'd also point out that the "its all futile, we're all doomed, everyone is going to die" approach you are taking is not only counter to the prevailing consensus but also generally criticized by many real environmental advocates because it leads to nihilism, indifference and inaction.

With regard health care rationing, I read an opinion once (and this wasn't a mad hairbrained thing, it was considered allocation of scarce resources) that when healthcare in limited supply, resources should be focused on the usually fit healthy working age population. Children (beyond vaccinations), the elderly and the disabled getting low level care. Reason being, the above groups use up vastly disproportionate amounts of healthcare and very often just die after it all anyway. Whereas the working population are carrying everyone else, scarce health care has to be focused on them to keep them healthy and working.

What, you didn't like my version of a "thought experiment?" 😄 So much so that you start name-calling and run away? How very mature.

What you have been doing is a passive aggressive form of attacking people who disagree with you and you know it. There's only so much of that I can tolerate. I actually held out for quite awhile before criticizing your ridiculously transparent "thought experiments" and I went pretty easy on you, but you still kept up the same intellectually dishonest tactics. You don't like it when it's pointing back at you but you're perfectly happy to dish it out.

No worries, I'll trouble you with injections of reality no longer.

Yes, I have heard that idea expressed many times and I can't support it. The idea that some people deserve resources more than others is abhorrent to me. I understand that it makes a certain amount of pragmatic sense on the surface. The problem with this idea, beyond it being ethically unacceptable, is that human rights laws exist to protect us from discrimination based on our age and ability. Those laws would have to be scrapped, which means they're also open to being scrapped when it comes to sex, race, etcetera, if it is deemed to be practical by those in power.

Yup. You could argue that as men hold the most power/income we should focus our medical resources on them instead of women.

I haven't been passive aggressive about anything, I've been overt and transparent as to why I dont agree with people.

Including pointing out the extreme nihilism inherent in the many posts that see human extinction as a good or essential thing, for the sake of the planet, and the logical endpoints of that level of contempt for human life.

I've also acknowledged that I dont believe people actually have the same degree of contempt for current or future humans, and their happiness and security, as their pro-extinction posts suggests, and that I think they're simply being trite.

The climate crisis is indeed dire but what you're peddling - that the inevitable end point is extinction - is not true. A decade or two ago, an apocalyptic level of warming was within the range of reasonably-possible outcomes. The consensus is that human efforts to limit warming have very likely averted the worst possible outcomes (while, sadly, failing to achieve the best). The climate crisis is now extremely unlikely to lead to extinction, but humanity still needs to work hard to minimize the extent of (now inevitable) warming.

Which is why the nihilism you're peddling, regarding the inevitability of extinction, is also a harmful attitude, as it breeds defeatism and inaction on the environment.

It is also extremely rich for you to accuse anyone else of intellectual dishonesty. I dont believe I have misrepresented anyone - I have probed and counter-argued - you, on the other hand, are repeatedly misrepresenting other people's arguments. Its your dishonesty (or perhaps, genuine inability to understand what others are saying) that I find objectionable.

Well, I’m sure arguing online will fix it.

Could be the tag-line for the whole AIBU board, tbf.

the human race wont die out but western cultures such as ours will. there are plenty of countries reproducing at more than the required repopulation figure. there are segments of society in uk reproducing at higher rates. its more a question of how much do we want to preserve our culture and way of life for our children's children.

I think you're being extremely naive and also deliberately ignoring reality. I saw a health trust on TV the other day saying they'd developed a system to identify breadwinners and fast track them for treatment. They have found this prevents a lot of knock on problems. It means people can get back to work and this can prevent a whole family sometimes falling into poverty and homelessness with the cascade of health and social problems this can then bring. The health trust said this approach was actually saving time and money. If these doom and gloom population predictions come true there won't be the people available to deliver all this care and healthcare for the elderly. imo it makes sense even now, in the UK to prioritise working people for healthcare if conditions stop them working. Let's say you have a year long wait for a new knee (setting aside for a minute we shouldn't have a year long wait) we have a finite number of knee surgeons all working flat out. One of those knee surgeons needs a new knee and can no longer work without one. Imo it would make absolutely zero sense, for the sake of fairness, to stick the knee surgeon at the back of the year long queue (now 14 months long because you are one knee surgeon down) rather than leapfrog them to the front and get them back to work.

Sorry, that was meant to be in reply to this post

That a degree of resource-management happens in Healthcare is indeed undeniable, and it would be absurd to completely disregard the characteristics of patients.

A fairly obvious example is organ transplants, where a child would likely be given priority overly an elderly person, or a non-alcoholic person given priority over an alcoholic.

I would think that, for most people, there being some degree of rationing is uncontroversial but it is, of course, fraught with ethical concerns.

In terms of what's been discussed in the thread, however, the PP you're responding to is falsely asserting that people are advocating for withdrawing care from the elderly - which isn't the case or, at least, is a gross misrepresentation.

The well-known problem of an aging population, that governments have already struggled with, is that the proportion of retirees is ever-increasing and the proportion of working age people ever-decreasing, which renders the system unsustainable.

If this type of demographic change continues (and its projected to not only continue but accelerate), and absent a radical solution yet-to-be found, we either preserve 100% of existing entitlements until the system collapses (leaving future generations in complete economic ruin, with little-to-no state support) or we try to find a more sustainable level of state-support.

Oddly, some of the same people who care about resource scarcity and management in an environmental sense are unwilling to acknowledge the issue in a societal or economic sense, and think you're a monster if you think that sustainability needs to apply in that context, too, so that future generations aren't left with nothing.

Of course elderly people are deserving of care but not just today's elderly - tomorrow's too.

I seldom miss an opportunity to promote Kurzgesagt - a YouTube channel that I think does an excellent job of distilling complex scientific, political, technological and other issues into digestible and well-sourced videos.

They have a couple on the birth rate issue, but their most recent (focused on South Korea) is possibly the better one, as its something of a case study:

and on Climate Doom:

Your post just before this was a reply to me? That's odd, because it has nothing to do with my post. What has naivete got to do with it? My objection was an ethical one, not a pragmatic one, and just being dismissive by saying I'm naive (which is strange, because other people say I'm cynical) is non-responsive to my points re; human rights and ethics. What is your stance on those matters?
I don't even disagree with what you say in that post, so colour me confused as to what we're supposed to be debating.

Yep. Plus they're stronger, thus more able to do the intense physical labour of the future, such as trying to farm in drought conditions. It could also be argued that races/cultures who are not producing enough children to pay for future needs should get fewer resources, or people who are unemployed (thus are not deemed "productive") should get fewer resources. It's a dangerous line of reasoning in addition to being ethically repugnant.

Given how many problems humans cause, this is great news for the planet.

Fingers crossed whatever comes after us is significantly less awful.

If you denounce something as "ethically unacceptable", people are going to take that as disagreement, and I don't think you can entirely divorce ethics and pragmatism, particularly where there are finite resources.

For example, if we accept as an absolute imperative that everyone is entitled to the same level of care, without any prioritization based on personal characteristics, you'd end up with instances where (for example) a donor heart is given to a 90 year old over a 9 year old on a first-come, first-served basis.

An argument could be made that this would be entirely ethical, and pragmatism shouldn't come into it. I would disagree, and say pragmatic considerations (how many extra years of life that replacement heart could give to each candidate) are relevant to informing ethics.

That isn't unlawful, either. Discrimination can lawfully occur where there exists a good policy reason.

Similarly, although you might think it unethical to reduce spending on retirmenet age benefits (which, no doubt, many would agree with), I think the fact that current levels of spending being unsustainable means that we need to balance the needs of this generation of elderly people with the anticipated needs of the next (and the next).

I'm not blind to the ethical issues of reducing support that, for some people, is already deeply inadequate - however, pragmatism tells me we need to also weigh our ability to meet the future needs of others (and that failing to do so would be unethical).

Exactly. Acknowledging that it's great news for the planet does not mean we're in favour of the suffering that's to come. No sane person would want what's coming to us, but we asked for it and we need to accept responsibility for it.
Another heartbreaking aspect is that the other inhabitants of the planet who did nothing to cause this have to suffer and die as well. All because of us.

@BoldGreenDreamer

Please stop causing me to get notifications of multiple posts after insulting me and claiming you were done talking to me. I took you at your word and agreed to let it go, but you just won't stop. I am keeping my word and not discussing these issues with you any further as per your own suggestion. No need to respond, I'll know you have agreed when my notifications get below the double digits. Thank you for the previous discussion and have a good day. 🙂

I’m quite disgusted at posters cheering on human extinction.

Yeah, thoughts of the extinction of the human race does seem to put a kick in the step of some mnetters. I bet these doomsters are hard work to live with.

Ultimately, this talk of humans dying out (and the supposed merits of that) is childish.

(Well, childish is perhaps a little generous).

It's not realistically going to happen, not from climate change and not from the fertility crisis.

At warming of 3°C or 4°C, before 2100, there would be a risk of widespead societal collapse.

At 5-6°C, large areas of the planet would become all-but-uninhabitable, but extinction would remain unlikely.

Above 6°C, the theoretical risk of extinction becomes a real one.

Even if we simply continue on with current policies, to the extent they have already been implemented, the IPCC projects warming of 2.5-2.9°C.

We should absolutely be striving to do far better, but no serious person thinks extinction is even close to being on tbe agenda from climate change.

While I'm sure everybody recognizes that a drop in the global population is desirable, the demographic challenges it brings will be extremely difficult to navigate, and is something that should be confronted at the earliest opportunity to offset the worst of it. That could be by trying to manage the pace of the decline and/or through relocation of resources (including new technologies).

I suppose, though, that making ill-informed, unscientific declarations of how we're all doomed is a nice and convenient way to absolve yourself from feeling any responsibility towards any generation that is younger than you - particularly if it involves even a modicum of personal sacrifice.

Its the same brand of selfish ignorance, greed and science denialism that will almost certainly see humanity miss the best-case scenario of warming of around 1°C, but with a cherry of hypocrisy atop it.

Can I just point out that even private pensions need
younger people to pay them by working in all kinds of companies that then produce dividends to pay out to pensioners. Everybody not working, for whatever reason, retired, on benefits, children, or just plain rich, is supported by working people.