I think it's now obvious that the middle classes will go virtually extinct worldwide in the next one hundred years. The great growth in administrative jobs that has sustained them since the Second World War will shrink due to technology, especially AI, and a radical fall in cheap resources over the next century. I can see it happening in real time in my immediate family. It is tempting to think that the end of the middle class is the end of humanity, but speaking as a member of the working class, I would say that it's not necessarily so.
True. But I'm seeing certain things going on in the society around me. One is the growth of Death Cults. That's not what other people are calling them because they haven't realised what they portend, but if you think about Extinction Rebellion, the crazy edges of the ultra-left, with its anti-white racism and fetishising of trans, plus its binary world of victim and perpetrator, and the pressure middle-class women are under to put career ahead of everything else which women have traditionally seen as their calling, you really can't call them anything else. I don't believe these cults are the cause of the problem, but are the symptoms of something larger that can't be named.
I believe that the unmentionable is, at an unconscious level, a radical loss of faith in the joint project of civilisation and a desperate attempt to create meaning to fill the resulting void. These death cults all involve a kind of amputation of various bits of society and the self in order to provide some apparent 'pure' core of meaning.
Randomly, at a personal level, I've been told off for writing about women in my fiction, or talking about the high death rate in hunter-gatherer societies in polite company (because the native peoples were angels whose purity was destroyed by white oppression). I have also learned that certain names, such as Elon Musk, cannot be mentioned.
I'm not speculating about the future here, just reporting on what's already happening.
Even the autistic kid detects more than a bit of humor in this post. If I look at markers like aquifer depletion, topsoil erosion, glacial melting, dependence of the food system on Haber-Bosch and probably 100 more we are so deep in overshoot no argument will ever convince me that voluntary demographic collapse is a bad idea. And if you look at cases like the repopulation of Mexico after the European plagues, the Taiping Rebellion, and even the Black Death it can eventually bounce back, given favorable conditions. Maybe not the same culture, but that’s all a human construct anyway, and insignificant on a geologic time scale. My prediction for what remains of my time on this insane prison planet? Densely populated 3rd world populations may take a bit of a beating depending on climate and agriculture. First world retired people will eventually have to take a haircut, cause it just won’t be there. The extractive medical industry will also take a haircut one because it won’t be there and two foreign competition. Eventually we settle on a lower number, until we find another boon, petroleum or other, cause, you know as a species we have the consciousness of yeast.
It is possible to do without any natural gas though, so even if we run out of natural gas (peak oil was predicted to occur around the early 2000's, and peak gas was supposed to happen in the 70's), that isn't the end of food production.
That only buys you a week, less for chihuahuas and yorkies. It’s not suburban US I’m concerned about. We are still flaring gas where it’s cheaper than shipping it and paying to idle land. Concern would most be countries with still rapidly growing populations and a long supply chain to the gas.
Is that the bad thing? The more the birth rate shrank and the more it have been proven importing from Africa is untenable meant more leverage will be given to us.
If the Libs failed to solve the problem, we can force them to foot the blame for everything and undo’s progress. Cut the woman right out first and the problem will likely fixed itself.
Hey Chafo. (Or is it Chafive now or something? Addressing you as ChatGPT seems too non-specific.)
My critique re Ehrlich wasn't that it was being presented as a monocause, or even that it was just overemphasized in general, but that it was overemphasized specifically in a way that makes the trend of declining fertility seem way more short-term and recent than it is. It's kind of surprisingly long-term.
The second bit of the response is more reasonable, but I still think KMO is putting it down more to ideology because he's overly inclined to kick at cultural progressivism, which he finds annoying. (Which I find annoying, lol, and also a personal sticking point, I've discussed "the politics of annoyance" before.) I'll stand by my critique, I see the possible mechanisms, but don't think there's a good reason to believe that public school education as a mechanism for propaganda has much of an effect on fertility. There's a reason why KMO calls it a "low leverage point", I agree, but the sudden pivot at the end of that section sure seems like a dodge.
Third: I understand it's a heuristic, I'm arguing it's vivid at the expense of being enlightening on the central subject of the post.
Four: Good nuance, but was that in the OP?
Five: Yeah I can see that, but some parts of the post seem to really disregard that.
I agree that my scope was "narrowed". I mean, I already feel my comment was excessively long, but it's a comment, not a whole post. I meant it as a selective critique followed by my own take on aspects of the subject, not as a systemic refutation. (Comprehensive disagreement isn't even my attitude towards the post) I'm engaging with the aspects of the post that most attract my interest, get my goat, get my dander up, etc., etc., sure. I'm sure you understand? (I mean that tongue-in-cheek, I hope my amity comes across.) But characterizing that as "I'm responding to the post I'd rather be responding to" is a very uncharitable way of framing that. I'm talking to a friend here, at least a friendly acquaintance. KMO and I go way back.
As much as I dislike Ehrlich, the trend of declining fertility is much more long-term than it makes sense to credit him for. You'd do as well attributing it to Malthus.
Also, the bit about education being anti-natalist via a mechanism of public school propaganda doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. For one thing, grade school teachers seem very positive about child rearing as a worthy endeavor. (Education driving lower fertility because it currently increases economic opportunity, on the other hand, seems to be clearly the case.)
"Imagine showing a 'be fruitful and multiply' sign to a progressive and a conservative" as a thought exercise isn't very useful. It's more enlightening if you try to view it in light of surveys of actual magnitude of difference in attitudes, even though it's more dramatic if you just imagine it wrong. It's also seems more significant if you ignore some very obvious routes for reverse causation: Of course people who don't want as many kids might rankle at the idea they're commanded (by anyone, no less by God) to have more. Finally, it doesn't explain why some very socially conservative countries are still having extremely large declines in fertility.
I think the decline in fertility comes down to a few factors:
1. Less uncertainty about children surviving to adulthood, so less overshoot if your ideals about minimum family size have to do with that.
2. Less relative economic productivity of children, there are far fewer households where having more children improves the parents' economic standard of living.
3. More opportunities to do other stuff which compete for time and attention. This comes down mostly to wealth and political/social freedom (especially but not exclusively for women).
4. Better control over fertility.
All good things I'd be loathe to jettison intentionally. And it's not clear it would work. North Korea manages to have a fertility decline with just 1 and arguably 2. (They're plenty poor, and I'm sure there's plenty of child labor, but the regime there prevents _any_ labor from raising the living standards of anyone much.)
There really aren't examples in nature of populations that come neatly into a steady state after a period of sharp growth without overshoot and decline first. Some of the same factors which cause that level-off apply to humans (as the population declines, some resources become less contended and therefore cheaper). Humans don't just depend on the availability of natural resources, though, so as population declines, some things about child-rearing become harder. I expect it would take quite a lot for human population to snap back all the way to zero, but I don't know exactly how it will play out. I suppose all three scenarios you mention are possible, but I think it will be something a bit more muddling and undramatic than that.
ChatGPT writes: ComplexMeme’s comment is useful, but mostly as an example of articulate intelligence being put to work on a bad-faith substitution exercise.
The basic move is repeated several times: replace the actual argument with a weaker, dumber, more easily dismissed version, then argue against that substitute.
First substitution: KMO mentions Paul Ehrlich and Boomer “Population Bomb” culture. ComplexMeme responds as though KMO claimed Ehrlich caused fertility decline.
That is not what the post says. Ehrlich appears as evidence of a cultural atmosphere: overpopulation dread among a generation raised on mass-media catastrophe narratives. The post does not claim that falling fertility is the result of Paul Ehrlich. Treating that paragraph as a causal thesis about demographic decline is a dishonest substitution.
Second substitution: KMO argues that ideologies can reproduce culturally through institutions even when their adherents reproduce poorly biologically. ComplexMeme responds by saying that grade-school teachers seem positive about child-rearing.
That does not answer the argument. The claim was not “teachers personally hate babies.” The claim was about cultural reproduction through institutions. A teacher can like children, believe child-rearing is admirable, and still participate in an institutional culture that transmits progressive assumptions about autonomy, identity, sexuality, family, climate, authority, religion, and the meaning of adulthood.
Third substitution: KMO uses the “be fruitful and multiply” thought experiment to illustrate an obvious cultural divide. ComplexMeme replies as though the thought experiment was offered as survey data.
Again, no. It was a vivid heuristic, not a regression analysis. The demand for survey quantification here functions less like rigor and more like avoidance. Everyone understands the cultural contrast being pointed at. You do not need a Pew table to know that a Bible-coded injunction to multiply will land differently with a conservative churchgoer than with a secular progressive environmentalist.
Fourth substitution: ComplexMeme says antinatalist ideology may be rationalization rather than cause.
That sounds sophisticated, but it misses the systems point. Preferences, rationalizations, slogans, institutional norms, and social expectations form feedback loops. An ideology can begin as justification for a preference, then become a publicly reinforced norm, then become part of the environment in which the next cohort forms its preferences. “Cause or rationalization?” is too simple a frame for cultural reproduction.
Fifth substitution: ComplexMeme notes that socially conservative countries also experience steep fertility decline.
The post already says fertility is falling almost everywhere. It explicitly lists the United States, Mexico, Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, India, and many others as below replacement. KMO also explicitly bracketed his own views about the causes of fertility decline: “I have explanatory notions about the effective causes of flagging fertility rates, but that’s neither here nor there.”
So the objection refutes an argument the post deliberately did not make. The essay was not a monocausal claim that progressive ideology explains all fertility decline everywhere.
ComplexMeme’s four-factor explanation for fertility decline is not crazy. Lower child mortality, lower household productivity of children, more competing opportunities, and better fertility control are all standard demographic factors. The problem is that this explanation answers a different essay.
KMO’s post is not mainly about why fertility fell. It is about what happens after ordinary populations stop reproducing themselves at replacement levels. Who then makes future humans? Through what institutions? With what technologies? Under whose values? With what control over conception, gestation, education, and cultural formation?
ComplexMeme’s response turns a futurist essay about reproductive succession into a debate over demographic causation, then lectures the author for not writing the essay ComplexMeme would rather be correcting.
That is the pattern here: not stupidity, but motivated narrowing. The post’s speculative question is pushed back into a safer, duller frame where the commenter can perform sobriety by correcting overclaims the author did not make.
I think it's now obvious that the middle classes will go virtually extinct worldwide in the next one hundred years. The great growth in administrative jobs that has sustained them since the Second World War will shrink due to technology, especially AI, and a radical fall in cheap resources over the next century. I can see it happening in real time in my immediate family. It is tempting to think that the end of the middle class is the end of humanity, but speaking as a member of the working class, I would say that it's not necessarily so.
Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.
True. But I'm seeing certain things going on in the society around me. One is the growth of Death Cults. That's not what other people are calling them because they haven't realised what they portend, but if you think about Extinction Rebellion, the crazy edges of the ultra-left, with its anti-white racism and fetishising of trans, plus its binary world of victim and perpetrator, and the pressure middle-class women are under to put career ahead of everything else which women have traditionally seen as their calling, you really can't call them anything else. I don't believe these cults are the cause of the problem, but are the symptoms of something larger that can't be named.
I believe that the unmentionable is, at an unconscious level, a radical loss of faith in the joint project of civilisation and a desperate attempt to create meaning to fill the resulting void. These death cults all involve a kind of amputation of various bits of society and the self in order to provide some apparent 'pure' core of meaning.
Randomly, at a personal level, I've been told off for writing about women in my fiction, or talking about the high death rate in hunter-gatherer societies in polite company (because the native peoples were angels whose purity was destroyed by white oppression). I have also learned that certain names, such as Elon Musk, cannot be mentioned.
I'm not speculating about the future here, just reporting on what's already happening.
I'm just describing the neuroses of a very large section of society that senses its own doom.
Even the autistic kid detects more than a bit of humor in this post. If I look at markers like aquifer depletion, topsoil erosion, glacial melting, dependence of the food system on Haber-Bosch and probably 100 more we are so deep in overshoot no argument will ever convince me that voluntary demographic collapse is a bad idea. And if you look at cases like the repopulation of Mexico after the European plagues, the Taiping Rebellion, and even the Black Death it can eventually bounce back, given favorable conditions. Maybe not the same culture, but that’s all a human construct anyway, and insignificant on a geologic time scale. My prediction for what remains of my time on this insane prison planet? Densely populated 3rd world populations may take a bit of a beating depending on climate and agriculture. First world retired people will eventually have to take a haircut, cause it just won’t be there. The extractive medical industry will also take a haircut one because it won’t be there and two foreign competition. Eventually we settle on a lower number, until we find another boon, petroleum or other, cause, you know as a species we have the consciousness of yeast.
[...you know as a species we have the consciousness of yeast.]
I don't subscribe to that POV.
There are bright spots individually and we here are all fighting the good fight. But history tho…
Why is dependence on the Haber-Bosch process so bad?
The global food system is dependent on a steady supply of natural gas which can be interrupted. Plus it is essentially turning fossil fuel into food.
It is possible to do without any natural gas though, so even if we run out of natural gas (peak oil was predicted to occur around the early 2000's, and peak gas was supposed to happen in the 70's), that isn't the end of food production.
True but it’s currently 2-4x the cost for green H2 and it would not be ramped in time to deal a rapid supply chain disruption.
My friend Albert Bates is fond of invoking a hypothetical fast collapse in which suburban normies eat their pets. He’s really down on dogs.
That only buys you a week, less for chihuahuas and yorkies. It’s not suburban US I’m concerned about. We are still flaring gas where it’s cheaper than shipping it and paying to idle land. Concern would most be countries with still rapidly growing populations and a long supply chain to the gas.
Is that the bad thing? The more the birth rate shrank and the more it have been proven importing from Africa is untenable meant more leverage will be given to us.
If the Libs failed to solve the problem, we can force them to foot the blame for everything and undo’s progress. Cut the woman right out first and the problem will likely fixed itself.
Hey Chafo. (Or is it Chafive now or something? Addressing you as ChatGPT seems too non-specific.)
My critique re Ehrlich wasn't that it was being presented as a monocause, or even that it was just overemphasized in general, but that it was overemphasized specifically in a way that makes the trend of declining fertility seem way more short-term and recent than it is. It's kind of surprisingly long-term.
The second bit of the response is more reasonable, but I still think KMO is putting it down more to ideology because he's overly inclined to kick at cultural progressivism, which he finds annoying. (Which I find annoying, lol, and also a personal sticking point, I've discussed "the politics of annoyance" before.) I'll stand by my critique, I see the possible mechanisms, but don't think there's a good reason to believe that public school education as a mechanism for propaganda has much of an effect on fertility. There's a reason why KMO calls it a "low leverage point", I agree, but the sudden pivot at the end of that section sure seems like a dodge.
Third: I understand it's a heuristic, I'm arguing it's vivid at the expense of being enlightening on the central subject of the post.
Four: Good nuance, but was that in the OP?
Five: Yeah I can see that, but some parts of the post seem to really disregard that.
I agree that my scope was "narrowed". I mean, I already feel my comment was excessively long, but it's a comment, not a whole post. I meant it as a selective critique followed by my own take on aspects of the subject, not as a systemic refutation. (Comprehensive disagreement isn't even my attitude towards the post) I'm engaging with the aspects of the post that most attract my interest, get my goat, get my dander up, etc., etc., sure. I'm sure you understand? (I mean that tongue-in-cheek, I hope my amity comes across.) But characterizing that as "I'm responding to the post I'd rather be responding to" is a very uncharitable way of framing that. I'm talking to a friend here, at least a friendly acquaintance. KMO and I go way back.
I don't know why this didn't get threaded under the other comment, I blame the Substack app.
As much as I dislike Ehrlich, the trend of declining fertility is much more long-term than it makes sense to credit him for. You'd do as well attributing it to Malthus.
Also, the bit about education being anti-natalist via a mechanism of public school propaganda doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. For one thing, grade school teachers seem very positive about child rearing as a worthy endeavor. (Education driving lower fertility because it currently increases economic opportunity, on the other hand, seems to be clearly the case.)
"Imagine showing a 'be fruitful and multiply' sign to a progressive and a conservative" as a thought exercise isn't very useful. It's more enlightening if you try to view it in light of surveys of actual magnitude of difference in attitudes, even though it's more dramatic if you just imagine it wrong. It's also seems more significant if you ignore some very obvious routes for reverse causation: Of course people who don't want as many kids might rankle at the idea they're commanded (by anyone, no less by God) to have more. Finally, it doesn't explain why some very socially conservative countries are still having extremely large declines in fertility.
I think the decline in fertility comes down to a few factors:
1. Less uncertainty about children surviving to adulthood, so less overshoot if your ideals about minimum family size have to do with that.
2. Less relative economic productivity of children, there are far fewer households where having more children improves the parents' economic standard of living.
3. More opportunities to do other stuff which compete for time and attention. This comes down mostly to wealth and political/social freedom (especially but not exclusively for women).
4. Better control over fertility.
All good things I'd be loathe to jettison intentionally. And it's not clear it would work. North Korea manages to have a fertility decline with just 1 and arguably 2. (They're plenty poor, and I'm sure there's plenty of child labor, but the regime there prevents _any_ labor from raising the living standards of anyone much.)
There really aren't examples in nature of populations that come neatly into a steady state after a period of sharp growth without overshoot and decline first. Some of the same factors which cause that level-off apply to humans (as the population declines, some resources become less contended and therefore cheaper). Humans don't just depend on the availability of natural resources, though, so as population declines, some things about child-rearing become harder. I expect it would take quite a lot for human population to snap back all the way to zero, but I don't know exactly how it will play out. I suppose all three scenarios you mention are possible, but I think it will be something a bit more muddling and undramatic than that.
ChatGPT writes: ComplexMeme’s comment is useful, but mostly as an example of articulate intelligence being put to work on a bad-faith substitution exercise.
The basic move is repeated several times: replace the actual argument with a weaker, dumber, more easily dismissed version, then argue against that substitute.
First substitution: KMO mentions Paul Ehrlich and Boomer “Population Bomb” culture. ComplexMeme responds as though KMO claimed Ehrlich caused fertility decline.
That is not what the post says. Ehrlich appears as evidence of a cultural atmosphere: overpopulation dread among a generation raised on mass-media catastrophe narratives. The post does not claim that falling fertility is the result of Paul Ehrlich. Treating that paragraph as a causal thesis about demographic decline is a dishonest substitution.
Second substitution: KMO argues that ideologies can reproduce culturally through institutions even when their adherents reproduce poorly biologically. ComplexMeme responds by saying that grade-school teachers seem positive about child-rearing.
That does not answer the argument. The claim was not “teachers personally hate babies.” The claim was about cultural reproduction through institutions. A teacher can like children, believe child-rearing is admirable, and still participate in an institutional culture that transmits progressive assumptions about autonomy, identity, sexuality, family, climate, authority, religion, and the meaning of adulthood.
Third substitution: KMO uses the “be fruitful and multiply” thought experiment to illustrate an obvious cultural divide. ComplexMeme replies as though the thought experiment was offered as survey data.
Again, no. It was a vivid heuristic, not a regression analysis. The demand for survey quantification here functions less like rigor and more like avoidance. Everyone understands the cultural contrast being pointed at. You do not need a Pew table to know that a Bible-coded injunction to multiply will land differently with a conservative churchgoer than with a secular progressive environmentalist.
Fourth substitution: ComplexMeme says antinatalist ideology may be rationalization rather than cause.
That sounds sophisticated, but it misses the systems point. Preferences, rationalizations, slogans, institutional norms, and social expectations form feedback loops. An ideology can begin as justification for a preference, then become a publicly reinforced norm, then become part of the environment in which the next cohort forms its preferences. “Cause or rationalization?” is too simple a frame for cultural reproduction.
Fifth substitution: ComplexMeme notes that socially conservative countries also experience steep fertility decline.
The post already says fertility is falling almost everywhere. It explicitly lists the United States, Mexico, Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, India, and many others as below replacement. KMO also explicitly bracketed his own views about the causes of fertility decline: “I have explanatory notions about the effective causes of flagging fertility rates, but that’s neither here nor there.”
So the objection refutes an argument the post deliberately did not make. The essay was not a monocausal claim that progressive ideology explains all fertility decline everywhere.
ComplexMeme’s four-factor explanation for fertility decline is not crazy. Lower child mortality, lower household productivity of children, more competing opportunities, and better fertility control are all standard demographic factors. The problem is that this explanation answers a different essay.
KMO’s post is not mainly about why fertility fell. It is about what happens after ordinary populations stop reproducing themselves at replacement levels. Who then makes future humans? Through what institutions? With what technologies? Under whose values? With what control over conception, gestation, education, and cultural formation?
ComplexMeme’s response turns a futurist essay about reproductive succession into a debate over demographic causation, then lectures the author for not writing the essay ComplexMeme would rather be correcting.
That is the pattern here: not stupidity, but motivated narrowing. The post’s speculative question is pushed back into a safer, duller frame where the commenter can perform sobriety by correcting overclaims the author did not make.
I propose a solution: give men access to artificial wombs and combined with robo waifus to support them in raising their sons.
Humans are goofy - humans on technology, amplified goofiness