how does SL think about this?

we.need.more.workers...


https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/americans-aren-t-making-enough-babies-replace-ourselves-n956931

I think it's a good thing. Economically tricky but good for the planet.

Essential....and well past the optimum time (into factually ominous natural processes time in actuality) for the planet.

To me (a nevermo), Mormonism (at least from just-before-Utah-statehood times), has always appeared to me to be an economic pyramid scheme: perpetually dependent upon new "customers" (primarily new infants, secondarily: converts) "buying in."

Meanwhile, rising birth rates around much of the world, coupled with a great deal of willful ignorance and willful inattention, has pushed us (everyone on the planet) over many of the scientifically-determined "Do Not Pass" lines: declining ice amounts in the Arctic and the Antarctic, continuing loss of biodiversity, interruption of natural processes such as animal migration routes, proper plants for bees and other insects, overfishing the oceans, air and water pollution, truly massive waste plastics accumulations, etc.

"Low" birthrates (compared to what occurred in the twentieth century) are good for the planet, good for the people who live on this planet, good for the animals and plants which exist on this planet...and undeniably bad for the economic bottom line of the LDS corporation going forward.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2019 04:44PM by Tevai.

unfortunately?

economic stability needs workers & investments.

retired people depend on $ transfers, pensions & social security.

those need resolutions/remedies.

Yes, there is an economic impact. On the other hand, any given habitat will not exceed its carrying capacity. Our planet is getting precariously close, and nature is already doing drastic things to ensure that it won't happen here. Any decline in population growth, while it will present social and economic hardships in first-world societies, is still a boon.

The Mormons saw this coming a few years back when they changed the missionary program from a conversion program to a youth retention program. Virtually everything they are doing now is to double down on keeping the decreasing number of youth. And their success has been miserable.

For the Mormons this trend is more a nail in the coffin than Joseph nailing his ward. My opinion is that the Mormon church can get around it's terrible history with the youth, what they cannot get around is the fact that their church is boring and really stupid. Kids hate both boring and stupid.


From an economic standpoint our current immigration policy is going to hurt way more than the birth rate.

jacob:

I'm sure most RfMers agree with your comment on the change(s) in the missionary program, is there anything verifiable i.e. in writing that we can point to?

Jacob: "...they changed the missionary program from a conversion program to a youth retention program..." WOW--so insightful and succinct--Bravo!

scmd1-- At the risk of getting into a tangential brawl, the population is increasing, but I think we're far from the tipping point. As population grows, so does food supply and resource extraction, along with increased efficiency in services such as transportation and distribution. The cause for starvation and lack is political, not economic or logistical. According to the likes of lPaul Erlich, the "Harold Camping of scientific prophesy," we passed the population tipping point decades ago.

Moving on--in one article I recently came across, only Utah and South Dakota have a positive rate of population replacement.

The Malthusian dilemma long ago proved illusory. But what if the constraint is not food, or at least not directly food, but rather climate change and pollution?

That is more likely where the sustainability problem arises for the simple reason that there is little evidence that the supply of climate-dependent resources expands the same way that the supply of food has.

caffiend Wrote:

>
> scmd1-- At the risk of getting into a tangential
> brawl, the population is increasing, but I think
> we're far from the tipping point.

I don't want to engage in a tangential brawl either. I'll agree that we're not at a tipping point. We're closer, however, than I personally am comfortable in being.

Edited to add: Yes, it's far more than just food supply.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/15/2019 02:02PM by scmd1.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2019 11:17AM by caffiend.

No, not trouble. If the current economic system cannot function without a constantly increasing population, then the current economic system needs to change, and like it or not, at some point will change. Exponential growth cannot go on forever. It is possible to dodge and weave and delay the day of reckoning, but at some point population must stop growing, and may even need to shrink.

If we really need.more.workers, then, as jacob pointed out, current immigration policy is way more damaging than the birthrate decline. OTOH, if automation, robotics and AI are rendering a lot of occupations redundant, then a declining birthrate is a good thing. Fewer and fewer people are producing more and more. Of course, with the current economic system, that leaves the people who are no longer needed for production in a very awkward situation. Hence my claim that we don't need to change the birthrate. A dropping birthrate is a perfectly rational response to dropping employment opportunities.

Of course a dropping birthrate among Mormons in the US is going to scare the bejesus out of the Q15, and for very good reason. That is where most of their growth, such as it is, is coming from in the US. Sucks to be on the wrong side of history, and the Q15 seem to do that a lot lately.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> No, not trouble. If the current economic system
> cannot function without a constantly increasing
> population, then the current economic system needs
> to change . . .
===================

Bingo.

Will have to be based upon something other than the principle of exploitation (of the environment/planet, our youth, etc) and "More! More! More!"

Besides, this problem seems to be taking care of itself -- suggest google "mouse utopia experiment" - once start looking, will see modern correlates abound (e.g. herbivore movement, estimated at 60% of young Japanese men)

Fun times.

It may be good for the planet, but not for the country. If America doesn't replace its population that's dying off, who will?

Sure there's immigration. We already have that. The main message is that Americans are not replacing themselves. In a nutshell, what does that spell? At some point extinction.

Wow, that escalated quickly.

Worldwide there is little consensus at where the population of humanity will peak. Either 9, 10, or 11 billion. Either way extinction because of below replacement birth rates isn't a real thing.

Understand also that the US makes up about 4.4 percent of the worlds population at 325 million. And that the growth rate right now is about 82 million people a year worldwide. So every four years the world adds a whole US to the roster of humans.

Americans, as you put it, are literally replaceable.

What might cause the extinction of humanity? War, disease, hunger, climate change, and so forth. All of these are exponentially more likely to cause extinction than people having less babies. But you know what causes all of those things?

Over population.

"If America doesn't replace its population that's dying off, who will?"

A lot of people seem to assume that it is a bad thing if the current population is not replaced. Why? There were no humans on the western hemisphere 30,000 years ago, and neither the western hemisphere nor Africa and Eurasia and Europe peoples seemed to mind. Six hundred years ago there were no Europeans here. The indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere didn't mind.

Second, a declining birthrate for the last few decades being extrapolated into extinction is preposterous. There was a joke when I took statistics that "all you need is two data points to extrapolate to infinity".

The joke is that from a mathematical point of view, that's true. Two points determine a line, and you can extend the straight line on a graph out to infinity. The other part of the joke is that world events are never linear, though a linear approximation may be close enough over a short period of time. Assuming two or even, in the case of current birthrates, several decades of data, can be extrapolated out over centuries is silly. That was how Rodney Stark predicted that there would be hundreds of millions of Mormons a century after he extrapolated from LDS growth statistics in the 1970s, a good decade for LDS growth. His prediction now looks laughable.

Even Thomas Jefferson seriously botched an extrapolation when he said that there was enough land in the Louisiana Purchase that it would take 100 generations for Americans to settle all of it. He was off by about 95 generations, give or take. He also neglected to note it was already settled by native peoples.

I predict that, barring something like a nuclear conflict causing a sharp and near instant drop in population, that birthrates worldwide will be below replacement for at least many decades to come. There is no sense in which the world is ten times better with ten billion people on it that than it would be with one billion people. We came up with pretty clever and impressive people back when the world population was well under a billion. BTW, we hit a billion around the year 1800. Now for the first time in human history that women have pretty good control of their fertility, and of infant mortality, their fertility is going down and staying down. That's my prediction. We can tolerate a below-replacement birthrate for a very very long time.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/babies-wanted-nordic-countries-crying-kids-033117429.html

It seems the imported replacement population isn't working out as they had hoped.

Bro' Jerry: Regarding long-term extrapolation from short-term data, Mark Twain was very frightened by Christian Science's early growth. Eddy herself prophesied that all religions and denominations would embrace her "Divine Science" to various degrees, and medicine would be supplanted by her "healing ('Mind') science."

I am happy to report that Christian Science loses about 5% of its branch churches each year.

Thomas Jefferson, besides botching badly how long it would take for the Atlantic states to settle the Louisiana Purchase, also botched a religious prediction. He was quite fond of the secular/rationalist emphasis of the Unitarians, and predicted they would one day be the dominate US religion. That certainly didn't happen.

The U.S. is currently around 325 million in population. A casual look aroung the web puts us at 400+ million at 2050 (for instance the U.S. Census estimates 400 million in 2051, and 420 million by 2060.) Some gains come through births, some through immigration, and some through a longer lifespan.

Personally, I think our current population is plenty. I haven't notices a shortage of people in this country. Do we really want to become like Japan with too many people squeezed into too little space? Do we want to become like China with (eventually) a billion people competing for resources?

I know it's not a popular opinion, but I think that the total number of immigrants we take in needs to be reduced. We still have the mentality that we are an immigrant country, but I think we have long passed that point. Sure, take in the refugees, and some highly educated people, and some average people. But IMO the total number needs to be brought down.

are you aware of the demographics of age cohorts?

U.S. population average is seriously aging;

Robert Reich (frmr labor secretary) went online about this not too long ago.

not all mexicans do stoop labor, btw.

>>not all mexicans do stoop labor, btw.

I never said that they did.

I also simply stated the population projections that our U.S. Census Bureau has given. Other projections are fairly similar or in some cases show even higher numbers. I am going strictly by the projected numbers.

From today's Wall Street Journal.

Sorry, it's behind a pay wall, but an interesting read.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/utah-shows-how-labor-force-growth-fuels-economic-growth-11547809200?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=4

Every time I hear the "low birth rate" scam it is coming from "capitalists" seeking cheap labor.

hopefully at some point, we'll each be retirees & want a return on our social security payments....

They should start a religion instead.

Oh, but they have a religion. The low birth rate decriers tend to be conservative Christians, though conservative branches of other religions have a deep seated fear of being out-reproduced by competitors. They seem not to notice that birth rates even among high birth rate religions are dropping. They are just one generation of so behind what has already happened in industrialized nations.

It depends on the country and its government. If GDP rises and women get educated, birth rates will fall. But if a country like Egypt continues with terrible economic policies and girls are shut out of schools, the birth rate will remain high.

The greatest tool of subversion the rich countries have in their efforts to discourage extremism and overpopulation is to promote the education of girls.