

The last woman - How long do countries have until their populations disappear? - sasvari
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/08/populations

======
Dn_Ab
The obligatory xkcd link to go with this article[1]. But to turn this in a
more interesting direction, there are many unimaginable things that can happen
in 5,000 years and I can think of a few. And also reasons why people choosing
to self correct downwards might be not so bad. Some of the below were very
uncomfortable for me to imagine although I try to practice not closing my
mind.

 _Increased Productivity_ \- So far, technology has made each person much more
productive but it has also made them more expensive on the environment. I
don't see that changing. And with more people being able to do more, the base
level of required population drops. so a self chosen drop might be optimal for
society's continued well being.

 _Life span increases and uploaded minds_ \- If I were alive in 5000 years I
would be suprised if the average life span had not been extended by a
significant amount. Not to mention the possibility of minds hosted [2] on
computations carried out by photons, particle spin or whatever phlebotinum
they have.

 _Environmental stress_ \- With people living longer and getting ever more
expensive for the earth to host maybe it is ok that we are already self
correcting now. Food may not be a problem but exponentially growing economic
productivity could be. A lot of the environmental damage would be greatly
reduced if there were less people[3]. This is a very dangerous line of
thinking to traverse though and must be done only by those with a temperment
strongly fortified with wisdom. Too rational an approach at scale will not be
good for the individual.

 _Designer Babies_ \- I read that people are already filtering baby genders
and against diseases while they are still embryos [4]. It is only a matter of
time till filtering graduates to optimization. Ignoring the possibility of a
brave new world or gattaca scenario and the subsequent upheaval then
destabilization of society as the have nots revolt, such a population could
easily optimally repopulate the world at a controlled rate without people
having to marry to make babies.

[1] <http://xkcd.com/605/>

[2] The idea of mind uploading I find thrilling but very uncomfortable. Even
if I were one such uploaded being, the difference between that being and I
would dwarf the difference between me and a bacterium. I may as well have
died.

[3] Assuming it is not the endpath of civilization to completely dismantle its
planet for its needs. and then go invisible.

[4] [http://singularityhub.com/2009/02/25/designer-babies-like-
it...](http://singularityhub.com/2009/02/25/designer-babies-like-it-or-not-
here-they-come/)

~~~
nazgulnarsil
"I may as well have died."

then die, lots of people do. your assertion of a discontinuity between
yourself and your upload is baseless.

~~~
xyzzyz
So if I upload my mind to a replacement body, but not destroy the current one,
by continuity I get to control two bodies? Sounds cool, but somehow I don't
believe it.

This whole discussion is baseless as long as we have no clue about the origin
and mechanism of consciousness.

~~~
klipt
I think we have a lot of clues (based on neuroscience), lay people just have
trouble understanding them because they don't fit their preconceptions.

Basically: you are (mostly) your brain. If there are suddenly two copies of
your brain (whether meat or silicon), there will be two "you"s which will
diverge upon receiving different sensory inputs. Both will be "continuous"
with past "you" in that they will share memories formed prior to divergence.
However without some kind of telepathic link, they will not be continuous with
each other (apart from normal communication).

The question of "which one is real" is like asking which deep copy of a
variable is "real".

However, destroying one's physical copy in favor of having only a virtual copy
living at the mercy of some Matrix would be an ... interesting life choice.

------
nickolai
A line like

    
    
      However it is all moot anyway since we all die in december next year  
    

would fit nicely as a conclusion for the article.

More seriously the extrapolation just doesnt make sense. a hudred years ago
someone extrapolated the city sizes and concluded that urban civilisation was
doomed because of all the horse manure produced by a 'civillised' city. Thats
why we all live in caves now.

EDIT : link -> [http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-
th...](http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-
horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/)

------
mdemare
All those women who "opt out of the marriage market", who choose a career over
a family, these women won't have any descendants. To the extent that this
behavior is genetic, it will disappear within a few generations.

If there's one trend that you cannot extrapolate, it is this one.

~~~
hugh3
Y'know, I'm usually a believer in the genetic component of human behaviour,
but I don't think there's much genetics involved here. Fertility rates have
been dropping all over the civilized world. Reasons:

1\. Women are pursuing education and careers, which means they're often
already thirty before they're "ready" to have children -- leaving no time to
pump out more than one or two

2\. Children are getting more expensive, both in terms of the absolutely
compulsory costs and the things you're just _expected_ to buy for them

3\. For people who expect to get around by car, more than three children is a
nightmare. In fact, with all the modern safety regulations having more than
two children is a nightmare. My parents were happy to cart around three young
children in the back of an early 80s Mazda 323, but you couldn't do that any
more because a minimal child seat would take up nearly the whole back seat

4\. There's really no incentive to have more than two children any more. Child
mortality is nearly zero, and it's no longer expected that children will
support their parents in their old age.

~~~
gregpilling
I have three kids. The incentive? I liked the first one, and then we kept
going. How many kids do you have?

~~~
jordan0day
So why don't you have twenty? Or one hundred? Did the quality of the children
decrease linearly or is it just the third that was so bad you had to quit
making more?

I am kidding, of course -- I doubt too many people these days have children
for purely dispassionate economic reasons, but we shouldn't pretend that those
considerations don't enter into the equation, and aren't entirely legitimate.

------
skrebbel
Right, so a tiny measurement (relatively) is extrapolated to thousands of
years?

That's like standing at the beach, seeing the water rise and predicting when
Europe will have sunk.

~~~
thecompany
You need to learn more about the Economist's use of understated British humor
and irony, and not be so literal minded.

~~~
skrebbel
I stand corrected. I vote yours as the best comment in this thread.

------
mhb
And those women will be 300 feet tall because they were 3 feet tall when they
were 4 and they were 4 feet tall when they were 8.

~~~
Vivtek
Haha! It's probably good there will only be one per country, then. What an
amazing spectacle the world will be!

------
hermannj314
I think the phrase "By the same unflinching logic..." gives some insight into
the mood of the author.

I'm surprised they didn't drop in a "it's a well known law of the universe
that 20% of women have 80% of the babies..." Pareto adds credibility to any
predictive model (just make sure the numbers add up to 100, since you don't
want to look stupid)

------
nextparadigms
_"The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of
manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per
day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by
horse manure."_

Just imagine how many people were left out of jobs when cars appeared! (in
relation to the recent topic of automation)

------
tel
I hate to do this to everyone, but what every comment here was saying— _that
was the joke_.

Edit: and for more fun, watch to see what percentage of the comments on the
Economist's page fail to catch on as well.

------
wglb
Also in the realm of headline-seeking predictions:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb>: _The battle to feed all of
humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to
death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date
nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..._

In defense of their thesis, the authors of that book maintain _perhaps the
most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the
future_

------
mynegation
If we really want to try to take that seriously, I would add several things to
the model:

* trend for increasing life expectancy and average reproduction age (I am not saying age of menopause - there are probably pretty hard biological limits on that, but women increasingly choose yo have babies later in life).

* accounting for reproduction rate being dependent on overall population and/or probability density in a given region

* Migration from high reproduction regions to rich low reproduction regions

------
zeteo
The article is obviously tongue-in-cheek. But anyways, not all sections of the
population are declining at the same rate. Women who attend religious services
regularly, for instance, are much closer to the generational replenishment
rate, if not above it.

------
coliveira
All these economic/demographic studies suffer from a fundamental flaw. They
assume that trends will continue to hold for a long time. Nothing could be
further from the truth, because any trend tends to correct itself, unless some
disaster happens. For example, the trend of economic growth for several
countries, including USA and China, is widely speculative because doesn't
consider the changes in policy that can take place as soon as the next few
months. Similarly for demographic concerns: a single change in policy or an
external event can change the trends dramatically.

------
beerglass
Interesting.. but it assumes that thousand years from now it will still take
an entire woman, not just a sub-component called fertile frozen egg to create
a baby ex-vivo

------
bad_user
My favorite quote from Ice Age: _there goes our last female_ :)

I do not agree however with the article. There are many reasons for why the
female birth rates may be dropping, but all of them are solvable issues with
the societies they live in.

And we are over-populated, so fearing that the last human will be born in 1500
years from now seems like toiled-math to me.

~~~
hugh3
_toiled-math_

I'm not familiar with that expression.

Talking about certain countries going extinct is, of course, a bit facetious,
but the actual trend whereby inhabitants of rich countries are breeding way
below replacement rate while inhabitants of poor countries are breeding _way_
above is a genuine concern. Check out
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate)

~~~
bad_user
I meant "toilet math" -- I'm not sure if it's a good expression, I heard it
somewhere before; not a native English speaker :)

------
bitops
People never state it explicitly in these articles, but there's a very simple
reason for why this is happening.

Most guys treat women very poorly without realizing it. Even here in the
liberal Bay Area I encounter lots of guys (who vote Democratic) treating their
wives and girlfriends like chattel.

If us guys don't become gents, the trend will continue.

~~~
jordan0day
I'm having a really hard time believing what you wrote, so if it was really
clever sarcasm or humor, forgive me for being too dense to get it.

"Most guys treat women very poorly without realizing it." I disagree.
Certainly there's instances of _some guys_ treating women "very poorly", and
there's plenty of instances of _most guys_ treating women _differently_ , but
your assertion just seems way, way off. Unless your definition of "very
poorly" is incredibly different than mine.

" Even here in the liberal Bay Area I encounter lots of guys (who vote
Democratic) treating their wives and girlfriends like chattel." First, is
political stance really indicative of ability to treat (ostensibly) loved ones
well? I find this a bit hard to believe. Jerks are jerks, regardless of
political leanings, and I don't think either party is without plenty of them.
Second, what do you mean by chattel? I'm going to be a little pedantic an say
that the "ownership" implied by a marriage is actually a good thing. It's
bidirectional, voluntary, and symbolic. I know that's not what you meant
though -- so if you're meeting "lots" of men who treat their women like slaves
or livestock -- well, I don't want to visit the clubs you go to, I guess.

"If us guys don't become gents, the trend will continue." This was the icing
on the cake, though. Do you really believe that women were treated _better_ in
the past? You're implying that there will be less women because their
treatment is getting _worse_.

~~~
bitops
No sarcasm or humor. And your reaction is totally understandable - I think
most guys have this reaction.

It's true that not ALL men treat women poorly, absolutely. The clincher is
that many guys treat women poorly without realizing it. In their minds, in
fact, they're liberal types who are pro-choice, pro-equality, etc.

The political comment was just my attempt at some humor. Living in the Bay
Area I feel there's often a perception that "liberal guys" are automatically
in the clear. So maybe that was a bit sarcastic.

Chattels - yes, here in the US and parts of Western Europe, women are not
enslaved. But the "voluntary and bi-directional" bit is one of the biggest
falsehoods that we believe in collectively. Sure, it's voluntary - both people
said "I do", right?

Well, perhaps and perhaps not. You'd be surprised at the number of women (yes,
even here in CA) who feel that their best bet for social mobility is marrying
a guy who brings in money. In metro areas this is perhaps less true, but still
very much a reality in many parts of this country. Whether women tell guys or
not is another matter - in part because men just don't want to hear it.

Do I believe that women were treated better in the past than they are now? Of
course not. Women have gotten more rights and freedoms which is a good thing.

The issue is that many guys assume (falsely) that just because women have
these rights, they can continue to hold the same attitudes towards them in the
past and things will continue on their merry way.

I think gender/sex/family views are the most entrenched views that people hold
and the most resistant to change. People are incredibly freaked out by any
kind of "deviation" from what is considered the norm.

So, that's why when I read these articles that talk about all kinds "socio-
economic indicators" it sounds like complete BS to me. Not all of it,
certainly, but if we're going to be candid I feel that it's the bottom line.

Men need to learn how to treat women better.

[UPDATE: interesting - getting downvoted]

~~~
anamax
> You'd be surprised at the number of women (yes, even here in CA) who feel
> that their best bet for social mobility is marrying a guy who brings in
> money.

It's unclear how that has any relevance to your claim that women are treated
like chattel.

Marrying a guy who brings in money is a really good way to move up the social
scale, so it's unclear why you assume "surprise". Why are we supposed to be
surprised that women know that?

> [UPDATE: interesting - getting downvoted]

I suspect that's because your message is a mix of irrelevant true statements
and false statements.

You've claimed that women are treated like chattel but haven't provided any
evidence, or even examples, of said treatment.

------
ses
That has to be the most poorly justified argument I've heard in a long time.
So many factors such as immigration and inter-racial marriages are ignored.

Its an interesting question to pose, but could do with far more thorough
analysis!

~~~
cooperadymas
To be fair, they did refer to them as back-of-the-envelope calculations. Could
have used a little more emphasis on that fact though.

Would love to see some more detailed studies on this. I've long been amazed we
(as a country, race, world) haven't been more concerned with our rising
population issues. Maybe it will fix itself without drastic intervention?

~~~
cpr
Google "demographic winter."

The "population bomb" hysterics of the past few decades have drowned out the
reality of long-term population decline, which will have disastrous
consequences.

(Investigate before down-voting in a knee-jerk fashion.)

~~~
Vivtek
I did investigate. The phrase seems to be associated with European white
supremacy. Color me unimpressed.

~~~
hugh3
Guilt by association?

