Some people thought that the 'rona would lead to a baby boom for 2020. Apparently the opposite turned out to be the case (in the US anyway - not sure about UK).
Who could have foreseen that losing your job, your house, and not being able to meet a partner due to various lockdown measures might stop people from having children?
It’s not just the 'rona though. This quote from the end rings true from my experience in talking to younger people
“The cost of housing, the cost of education, all these things have become more and more difficult,” Dowell said. “I think the boomers themselves don’t realize how much harder it is for millennials today. And they think, ‘Oh yeah, when we were young we had to live, you know, on very little money, and we made do, and you can do the same.’ That’s the story, right? Well no, it really is a lot harder for young people today. It’s amazing how much harder it is.”
Given the certainty of more pandemics and economic turmoil over the coming decades due to the seemingly unstoppable march of ecosystem destruction I guess we can expect this trend to continue or even accelerate.
As ‘The Limits To Growth’ projected, the current population-overshoot episode resolves itself spontaneously in the middle decades of this century. Early signs of that trend already manifesting. What a surprise!
Yep. TLTG was one of the most successful modelling efforts in modern times.
As JMG had pointed out before, a population decline of 1-2% per year would be hardly noticeable to most people, but would have a truly drastic effect in just a few decades on the global pop.
The most noticeable part of it, ironically, would be the collapse of our economic system that would go into free fall…
Quite honestly P, I have to say: Good! It will take the pressure off the global ecosystem. We could have done that starting in the '70s, when the alarm calls were getting unmistakable. We chose to ignore them, so now we’re going to toe the line of Gaia’s imperatives without the option. Maybe we’ll learn the lesson belatedly. But learn it we will.
And an associated lesson, which we now have another chance to learn, is that in times of great crisis, scarcity-socialism is hugely better at dealing with our self-inflicted wounds than neo-feudalism. Awaiting - with increasing hope - the appearance of that realisation widely down here amongst the grass-roots, with associated mass insistence that we’re not having any of the WEF crowd’s shallow - and fundamentally unrealisable - techno-narcissist fantasies, but something more in line with Marx; and above all, with Gaia. As the startrekky ruling myth of our current scientism religion crashes, burns and vanishes, I expect that sea-change to become more unavoidable.
It’s that small place-swap, of a mere one or two percentage points, of aggregate global death rate over aggregate global birth rate, which will resolve our overshoot dilemma, more or less unnoticeably, apart from the upheavals which shifting demographic age-profiles in society impose peremptorily. That - the fit supporting the old and unable - is already putting pressure on things such as pension provision (where pensions actually exist; less and less so amongst - for example - the growing tranche of homeless destitute in the shining city on the hill (and its arse-kisser grovelling provinces)). Expect that to intensify…
I know it’s inevitable, but the sad truth is that the ones who will suffer terribly are, by and large, the innocent.
Those rich, white, male assholes who created this system will die surrounded by luxury without any punishment for their crimes. The eight year old girl I currently tutor twice a week will live a life more terrible than I can imagine. The 16 year old daughter of a friend who suffers from continuous anxiety about the state of the world will never be free of it, will never own a house, will never know anything but mass extinction and continuous climate catastrophe. I don’t know what kind of work will be available to these young people. I don’t know whether they will be able to start families of their own.
What a failure we were, the generations that preceded them…
I can’t say “good” about any of that… Even though I know that our system is unsustainable.
I don’t see any movement towards socialism. All I see is a rise of fascism wherever I look…
Quite right, of course. We can’t celebrate the suffering of anyone, particularly tender innocents. Unalloyed awfulness. But we bring it on ourselves. Free will is a non-optional part of the process. And if you think that we resurrect here continually in serial incarnations, purely as sessions in a wisdom-and-love learning holodeck, it seems to be the fate we choose, so the pain has to be experienced to get the lessons. It appears to be the essential spur to learning. And a further aspect of the constant-re-incarnation-for-learning idea is that each soul is offered a forethoughtful choice of options every time whilst in the the bardo state: ‘the state of being between lives’. Ultimately, we choose the outlined fate that we’re offered, difficult though that idea may be to swallow. And of course, none of the above abrogates our absolute duty of compassion and active help, wherever mayan suffering is encountered. I still think that the choice to be a bodhisattva is perhaps the most noble one that a soul can make.
PS: Thinking on the longer time-scale eases our current horror at the rise of fascistic attitudes. They seem to be fits of madness through which we have to go as learning processes, from time to time. Gods, when will we learn prophylactic prudence!! Sure, the fascistic impulse seems to be part of our range of innate responses to the world, But for my money, the impulse towards love, compassion, and justiceful fair sharing between we inherently social animals seems stronger, in the long run. (That’s the run in which I tend to think these days, what with geriatric old-age AND the awfulness of the times bearing down on my spirits constantly… )
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