You're confusing the noise for the signal. Actual cultural change happens very slowly, but there are wild gyrations in the meantime (aka noise). A lot of conformity or change that you see is just superficial, to fit in with the prevailing fashion. Fashion, which changes on a dime, is not the same as culture.
There's no point as an intellectual steering fashion, unless you're trying to sell a lot of transient stuff. But even then, you're better off just following the fashion, and following again when it changes again, rather than try to steer it. Even artists don't get to steer fashion until (for many of them) they're dead.
Most of the things you're worried about is just the peak of a generational bubble, and it's about to crash on its own. Whether you're in the middle of a dot-com, subprime mortagage or crypto bubble, it seems like the madness will go on forever. Afterwards, you wonder how people could have ever thought that way.
Even from a rationalist point of view, the better explanation for young people having less children is because they sense that the world's carrying capacity is being stretched. But this is an illusion caused by Boomers occupying all the prime spots in the modern capitalist resource distribution nodes and refusing to surrender them (from their POV, they're individualistic in orientation, so why should they?!).
But time cures all. When there are less Boomers taking those spots, purely via the passage of time, younger generations will sense there's more opportunity / the world has more carrying capacity, and fertility rates will naturally tick up. Equlibrium in action over many generations, not in a single generation.
From the point of view of humanity, the plight of single generations is noise, a blip. Forcing too much selection to occur in a single generation will gum up the works, because people just aren't that flexible. They're stuck to their ways, and will glom onto a superficial "overfitted" solution. Declaring that to be the best for all generations to-come is the surest way to cause multi-generational harm.
Generational change will bring discontinuous change that you can't project just based on selection or incentives. That's what usually trips up forecasters.
I'd speculate that it's even true for AI training. AI training that keeps working on recursively iterating a single model rather than periodically starting from fresh and retraining from scratch will end up glomming on a dead end solution. You're treating your current prevailing view of The Culture like that mono-model, rather than each future generation training a new one.
A new model that only superficially matches the old, **while it is still being graded by the old**. Once the old model is no longer grading the new one, the new one will starting churning out its own weirdness / hallucinations. Past performance is no guarantee of future results (so they say).
A cultural regime that continues on its existing track, while being graded by the same authorities, will probably continue on as you project. But that will not be the case when played out in time.
They didn't quickly reverse, because reversals mainly happen at the changing of power among generations (Generational Regime Change). The last 30 years have been dominated by Boomers staying in charge (e.g. average senator age increasing by 9 years from 1980 to now, 2 80 yr olds running against each other for president, literally the same 2 guys who could have/did run in the 1990s).
You'll see significant cultural change from the exit of the Boomers, particularly on the fertility issue. The current decrease in fertility is mainly created by Boomers, both spiritually (from their values / lifestyles) and materially (taking all the resources & advantages for their own generation over others).
It's fitting. The 20th century saw the world go from 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6 billion by 2000, the US from 70 million to 280 million. If anything we've had a long 20th century population growth boom (unprecedented in 10k years of human history) that we're now seeing the flip side of. Boomers themselves were the very product of this boom, and in their lifetime, brought about the trend's reversal.
The 20th century boom influenced the their lifestyle & values & choices, which are now proven not to be sustainable to the next generations. It won't last beyond them, because the next generation(s) experienced far more of the downsides than the upsides of it. (Plus the upsides they did experience, they mostly take for granted, like all generations).
No one, even among the Boomers, still feel like the whole package of the "Boomer way of life" can be just passed on unchanged from the Boomers to the next generations. So the culture of future won't be a straight-forward projection of the current trends of Boomer culture.
As Boomers no longer occupy the "grading" position of culture (the power/money/influence to determine & incentivize what's "good" or "bad"), you'll start to see people realize that none of the current cultural "mandates" are really mandatory, "taboos" may not be so forbidden, and you'll see some surprising quick reversals to the private preferences of the next generations.
For fertility, it still won't be that quick (due to biological realities), but it'll happen in a generation. For other issues, it'll happen in a few years. Some of it has already happened, as trends we thought were locked-in or already decided, turn out not to be case.
That people even discuss fertility as an issue is a sign of declining Boomer influence. In their hey-day, fertility was a quintessential personal individual choice, and not amenable to cultural pressure. People used to laugh at Singapore for over-emphasizing such things.
I actually quite liked the first part of your critique of this piece in your first post, re: fashion vs. culture. But imo your argument has now degraded to being an apparently somewhat bitter Gen Xer who feels defeated by a “Boomer” glass ceiling within your organization preventing your further ascension within the hierarchy, and you’ve turned this into a fundamental societal structural issue.
On the fertility point, though, you are clearly off the mark. One of Robin’s main points is that the culture has changed so much that not only is it obvious that fertility is below replacement and getting lower in all rich Western countries - the facts are the facts here - with governance (e.g. Social Security/Medicare) playing an important contributory role, and that it will be very difficult to change this even with government policy changes.
Thanks. I'm glad the first part of the critique resonated. I do think we shouldn't extrapolate the trends too much from the last gasp of Boomerdom that's happening right now, since I expect a reversal, much like a "blowoff top" in the financial markets.
As for your reactions. You're correct I don't like what you call the Boomer "glass ceiling", but I'm not sure more Xers moving up would have impacted fertility. Xers are also very individualistic culturally, and on the issue of fertility policy would not be that different than Boomers.
But I wouldn't call it as a "glass ceiling", as much as a filter, ensuring Xers getting promoted generally are of a certain mold. Boomers like ideological fealty and so Xers getting promoted either (pretend to) strongly support one of the Boomer ideological camps, or be strenuously neutral in the Culture Wars. That means no organic change, from people just being somewhat different than those older than them due to natural shuffling. This translates into reduced cultural evolutionary change
This I argue, more than technology, is what has maintained the cultural stasis of the last 30 years. That's why we love retro and nostalgia as a culture now. Why we essentially still have (the retainers of) House Clinton vs (the retainers of) House Bush in our political game of thrones.
As to fertility in particular, I agree it won't reverse all the way, nor should one want it to. The 20th century had a huge population growth and I'm not sure the earth can support indefinite continuation of that growth pattern. But I do share the concern about it dropping too low as well, and would like to see some reversal to a healthier equilibrium. Which I think it will. Xers won't block political / cultural attempts to increase fertility levels, but it will take time before results are manifested into the real world.
I don't share your concern about our governance troubles stopping this. With the diminishing influence of the Boomers, I expect governance to improve as well. That'll be part and parcel of the generational transition to Millenials. It definitely won't be a governance utopia, but the governance problems will be of a different type than those we're currently used to, which are characteristic of patterns of Boomer discourse and power struggles.
For example, I believe the effect of political polarization will decrease over time, in terms of preventing government action. Although the press doesn't see it, I believe "Polarization" as a political problem has already peaked.
Xer politicians don't mind political trading, even if they don't agree and aren't on the same side. Nor are they united enough to hold the line against it -- either side of the aisle. You see the Hastert Rule has already been thrown out of the window several times in the last few years, each time to great surprise from the media.
The Hastert Rule itself is ridiculous press fiction. It isn't a real rule, was applied incorrectly by its own terms, and wasn't even first adopted by Dennis Hastert. Who himself is a politician with enough personal problems, that for the Republican party's own sake, the less is mentioned the better. I'm waiting for future generations to laugh at the pose that the Hastert Rule is what stops a great democracy from doing what we need to do. But it's how the press chose to describes an Old Boomer power dynamic, turning it into a real thing for the last 20+ years.
Similarly the federal government neglected infrastructure & industrial policy for years, but the last few years have made the plunge. It's a bi-partisan change in mindset. You can argue that it was because of COVID, but I'd argue it's just as much due to generational differences. All politicians love to throw money, but Xer politicians would rather throw money at real physical things (even if it misses the mark sometimes) rather than furiously plugging the holes of the System which is Already Great.
Regarding fertility, Millenials don't feel as queasy having the govt setting or meddling with social norms, compared with Boomers and Xers. The same generational factors that lets "woke"-ness become a movement when young, will allow them to happily meddle with reproductive social norms and promote fertility when older. The exact content of the culture they're promoting at any moment is less consequential than them willing to see it as a lever that the government can pull or the culture can influence.
As you're astute enough to deduce I'm an Xer, I am curious to your views on how I see the near future playing out. Also, I want to know more about what you mean by Social Security / Medicare "playing an important contributory role". What structural forces do you see would stop a reversal due to generational turnover?
“ As to fertility in particular, I agree it won't reverse all the way, nor should one want it to”
Forgetting everything else, if you don’t want the Ponzi-scheme that is the generous welfare state (Social Security and Medicare in the U.S. for the old, Medicaid for the poor) to collapse, you need economic growth, not economic decline. Which is what you’ll get eventually from far-below-replacement fertility.
It’s true that the U.S. will weather this problem better than all other rich countries because of our ability to attract and “integrate”/assimilate immigrants, but we will eventually have the problem too, and our allies and trading partners is Europe and Asia will face the problems far sooner.
Second, if one’s morality leads one to think (as mine does) that more of the world’s poor billions deserve the chance to lead lives at least as good economically as the U.S. lower middle class does today, we need continued economic growth to achieve this, and the U.S. is the lead dog of the world’s economic engine. Economics is a positive sum game, not a negative one, and more intelligent, *productive* humans on the planet living in good cultures/civilizations has been demonstrated as by far the best way to pull the world’s poor out of poverty (with literally the only meaningful exception to this ever being authoritarian China implementing positive-sum capitalist economic practices to pull hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty).
Well, had you written the above 10 or 15 years ago, I’d probably agree with most of it (and likely neither of us would pay any attention whatsoever to the fertility issue).
As it is, here in 2024 I disagree with most of your premises. Whatever was the case for the two decades prior, we’ve had nothing like cultural stasis in the U.S. (and likely the developed world, though I claim no actual expertise or authority there) for the last 10 years. And there is little to nothing left of the Houses of Clinton or Bush running our country and institutions. It is the House of Obama that is literally (old sense of that term, not the new “figurative” sense) running the White House now, and the Obamians, the SJWs and some actual radicals that are driving institutions, narratives and most of policy on the left, even if/where it is nominally Boomers who were previously sympatico with Clintonistas still at the top of some of these institutions.
And while Clinton was as or more despicable than Trump in his personal affairs, and while I had numerous issues with the Bushes, on both the policy and culture front in most ways IMO our country would be *much* better off if indeed things were still driven by the Clintons on the left and the Bushes on the right. Imperfect though our institutions and society may have been and still are, we were much better off in aggregate with their agendas and policies than with what we have today.
Now on an operational basis, you and I very much disagree re the wisdom of the “Hastert rule” if you want a well- functioning political party, but Trump - even if I very much *do* approve of some of his changes/disregard of certain norms - is unlikely to maintain this one going forward if it serves his agenda, more’s the pity. IIRC Mitch McConnell no longer follows it in the Senate, if he ever did. But in any case, this is a tactical operations issue, not a strategic or policy one.
On the future and fertility, imo we likely agree that this will be a far lesser, even non-existent, issue in the U.S. for the next 20-30 years, mainly because our country is practically unique in being able to attract and absorb immigrants. And if we can ever get to a sane policy of minimizing illegal immigration, we will have little trouble having good, and as large as necessary, legal immigration. Other countries will face the problems much sooner. I was shocked when I saw that South Korea’s fertility rate is down to 0.80.
Re: fertility, my point about social safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare is no more and no less the conventional one that absent such a safety net, children are historically seen as “producer goods” and one’s solution to comfort and security in old age, where with the existence of a state-provided fairly financially generous social safety net for the old, children are now viewed as “consumer goods”. But while I have no doubt whatsoever that these programs are *a* major factor in fertility rate, I certainly would not suggest they are the only reasons, nor would I suggest removing them for the purpose of increasing the fertility rate even if one could somehow imagine that this were actually an option politically.
As for your other projections on the future re Millenials in power, I dearly hope you are correct, but I fear you are not. The current snowflake radicalism on campus, and recent polls showing that roughly half of 18-24 year olds chose “Back Hamas” in the Israel-Hamas conflict, even when given 3 choices (older millennials were also bad, but not nearly as bad), does not leave me optimistic about the morals and values of the current generation.
Thanks I appreciate the perspective and the elaboration.
What I'm saying is that the "snowflake radicalism" syndrome is almost entirely a reaction to Boomer dominance, and the Millenial's perceived need to maintain the sacredness of Boomer values while challenging it. They're trying to out-Boomer the Boomers and not really succeeding (but I'll give them credit for getting more traction than the Xers).
Millenials won't act like that when they get older. I believe they'll be more like the GIs. It's not a matter of them "growing up" -- they have different generational characteristics than the Boomer generation.
That's why some may consider their current behavior off-putting, because we haven't seen these characteristics en-masse in a long time. Not being a Millenial myself, I consider some of it off-putting as well, but I prefer it to more Boomer behaviors, which has stretched society well past its breaking point.
So I predict under a Millenial approach (when older), fertility issues won't be solved just by immigration (which can help) but also by cultural changes that promotes traditional families, a stay at home caregiving parent, and boosts the prestige of having multiple kids. You already see these cultural changes trending among the top 1%-5% now, which over time will be copied by those lower on the econ hierarchy.
I agree that Millenials will likely boost social safety nets, but I disagree that will have a negative impact on the fertility issue. In our society, children are too fickle to be reliable producer goods. It's more likely family & kids will end up being seen as *mandatory* consumer goods, and Millenial policy will encourage overspending on them, and provide govt subsidies to do so.
Taking GI's as an historical analogy. GI as they got older returned to a more traditional conception of society, against the social trends of their youth in the early 20th century (which was more "progressive" and "woke" than the mid 20th century). GI's promoted all sorts of consumption (and provided subsidies) to maintain standards of living to a what they felt was a normative level.
GIs and Boomers both enjoy government spending per their values -- the difference I see is GI's subsidized people to live to a norm (set by GIs in charge), while Boomers subsidized people to live "differently" (as part of that individual's expressive freedom). In this regard, Millenials love to declare social norms, and are more like GIs than Boomers.
The GI worldview eventially caused its own problems with conformity and overlimiting free choice (Millenials will run into their own similar overreach). These problems were rightly critiqued by the Boomers when young. But there are inherent trade-offs among all values, and Boomers just set it at the other extreme. Although it's fine as counterbalance, you can't keep doing it forever.
I recognize that this is a prediction of the future, and not an argument based on an assessment of the recent past. So I can't prove it'll happen with rigorous logic. Time will tell though. If you're willing to entertain that different generations have different thought patterns, and they're formed more in reaction to those of the previous generation rather than as a mere continuation of it, then you can see how this is possible.
I'm writing this out, more as a marker, so I can look back later on if my analysis was right or not. Also to get some immediate pushback to sharpen my thinking if something seems obviously wrong.
Like you say, neither of us would have been arguing about fertility 10 to 15 years ago, which is a sign that the discourse has shifted. Reproductive choice / family formation freedom is one of most sacred in the Boomer hierarchy of values, and now people are willing to discuss consequences and tradeoffs.
I've not read all your work on the fertility crisis, but I'm wondering if you've considered the possibility of the production and rearing of children being exported to the state instead of being firmly within the realm of the individual?
Many of the scenarios I imagine lead me to believe there will be an adoption of artificial wombs and genetic selection which, admittedly, would be a radically different world than we currently live in and would likely fail in it's implementation. I just don't see many ways to escape the Moloch-Style games we are currently experiencing in regards to fertility and see exporting these features of our civilization to a imagined bureaucratic-super-ai that removes the "human" components from our civilizations future & planning.
What deep values, exactly, are you defending? Apparently not the right to think for yourself, to think critically, to challenge convention, to do as you please as long as you aren't hurting someone.
Those are some of my deepest values, I think some of the deepest values of anyone who really tries to be rational. But if you wish to restrict what ideas people are allowed to have and require them to adhere to some traditional culture unquestioningly, then you're opposed to them. As are these fertile cults you talk about. They thrive on restricting critical thinking and independence of thought. That's the only way they can get people to accept their peculiar mythology.
That would mean your real deep value is "prevent civilization collapse." But that can't be, because you actually advocate civilization collapse as a means to an end:
> Obviously, one option is to “turn back the clock.” If we somehow bombed our world back to very low tech, with bad travel and comm tech, and much poverty, disease, and war, that would probably soon ensure sufficient cultural diversity and selection. But only until tech rose again to our level.
Look, if you truly think Western free-thinking civilization is doomed and the Amish will inherit the planet, then what's the actual problem from your perspective? If the Amish are going to win anyway, then you get what you wanted, world population will rise again after it falls, and no advocacy is necessary on your part. And you seem to be willing to accept that outcome. So what are you worrying about, what is the problem you are trying to solve? Why would it be necessary or desirable for the rest of us to be more like the Amish, centuries before the Amish will win anyway?
Of course, anything you want to forbid can and will be construed as “hurting someone”. People feel hurt all the time when they don’t like your actions, your words, your looks or—what they believe to be—your thoughts, and they don’t hesitate to retaliate when they think they can get away with it.
> ensure that the world encompasses sufficient cultural variety and selection pressures for cultural evolution to function effectively,
> the only other option I can see is to find a way to selectively restrain and control cultural evolution. To somehow distinguish adaptive from maladaptive cultural changes, and organize to sufficiently encourage the former while discouraging the latter.
a major problem is that the second approach actively undermines attempts at the first. so as people defect it become a self reenforcing maxima trading off resiliency for efficiency. This seems to have become the default dominant approach for the last century in many varied flavors...
Of course, culture drifts via memetic drift just as DNA genes drift via genetic drift. However that doesn't mean you can simply invoke drift to explain why some cultural changes are maladaptive to their human hosts. Once, long ago some aspects of culture were somewhat more aligned to the interests of their human hosts because they were passed vertically down the human generations. These days memes are often transmitted horizontally (with respect to host generations) - rather like parasites are. This means that their interests and those of their hosts need no longer be aligned. This makes the whole situation worse. If it was just memetic drift we were dealing with, we could simply apply selection to restore the original culture. However, the changes are probably not made passively - as a drift hypothesis would imply. It is likely that they actively help the associated memes propagate themselves. If you push on the culture it is likely to push back.
For example, in the case of fertility, the problem is not that culture changed in a random maladaptive direction. Instead, resources not spent on gene propagation can be spent on meme propagation. It is in the common interests of many memes to sterilize their human hosts. Then instead of nursing babies, they will be freed up to post to social media and inspire the next generation - if there is one. This is not a story about memetic drift. Rather DNA genes are fighting with memes over resources.
I agree that there is a problem, but I think you are possibly over pessimistic - I do not see that cultural selection pressures are weaker than they used to be, largely because there is so much more mixing. It is indeed possible that this leads to a homogenisation around maladaptive norms - but this homogenisation seems unlikely without a central authority to enforce it (examples would be welcome). Without enforced conformity, I expect we would have a faster rebound (in terms of population) than you would predict.
Furthermore, if you are correct about imitation of high status people being key (seems reasonable), then the big factor to watch is not overall cultural drift / competition, but elite trends. I think there is some cause for optimism. The big risk here remains that elites are incentivised to have fewer, 'high quality' children. However the ability to pass-on elite status seems at best no stronger than in the past, and low fertility pressures should be somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that new elites will be increasingly likely to come from high fertility subcultures (n.b. data should be available here), as well as the reduction in 'stasis bias' making it much easier to create new 'elite niches' within culture - once again, these elites will bias towards high fertility.
Tl;dr - I think there is enough competition within the system for error correction to be faster than OP.
What do you think of the hypothesis by biological analogy that governments are fundamentally parasites at the heart of all cultures and that the industrial revolution over-fed these parasites and they now have an excessively net negative impact on the cultural hosts and are incentivizing the centralization and totalization of a decaying culture?
It seems that the size/influence of governments is highly correlated with culture drift. Correlation != causation, but what else has higher correlation? It seems that hypothesizing causes of culture drift would help to hypothesize solutions and/or avoid future cultural evolutionary dead-ends.
As an example, Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union seems like a great micro-example of culture drift of an entire scientific field within a country due directly to government. Not easy to extrapolate from such a clear example, but seems plausible to extrapolate.
FWIW, I find the term "drift" confusing here. Drift implies movement in random directions, but what you appear to be worried about is a form of cultural lock-in, which seems like the opposite of drift.
This semantic confusion might point to a deeper conceptual problem - cultural evolution is a complex system with feedback loops operating on multiple levels. It's very hard to accurately predict the future trajectory of such systems. Does culture express our values? Embody them? Safeguard them? Distort them? Threaten them? Or is culture itself the domain in which we figure out what our values actually are? And therefore it doesn't even make sense to think of them as separate forces that can be in opposition? I think it's very hard to say.
This topic seems dangerously close to the kind of far mode steering you've cautioned about in the past. Better to steer firmly away from nearby, concrete disasters, and otherwise keep a light hand on the tiller and enjoy the ride, say I.
Random "drift" need not have a mean zero. Yes changes are hard to predict. The main issue is: how adaptive is it plausible to think changes are, on average?
Yes, to see this problem one must see abstractly to an important degree. If you aren't willing to do that, it will be hard for you to see the problem
> If we somehow bombed our world back to very low tech, with bad travel and comm tech, and much poverty, disease, and war, that would probably soon ensure sufficient cultural diversity and selection. But only until tech rose again to our level.
Maybe that rise can be prevented? If we preëmptively squander enough non-renewable natural resources before the bombing, at least we’ll ensure future humans will have a much harder time building a technologically advanced civilization, and its development certainly won’t follow the now-unavailable path it did the first time around. And they’ll probably be pretty pissed off if they ever discover what we did.
Fertility decline is arguably one of those rare cases where individual irrationality turns into collective rationality, rather than the other way around.
Since if humans do not voluntarily stop population growth, Naure will sooner or later do if for us. And probably not in a pleasant way.
And for the record: The stars, even assuming we could reach a large number of them (highly unlikely, to put it mildly) cannot be a solution. It can only be a temporary stopgap measure . Here is a math excercise: Assume for the sake of argument a 0.5 percent annual increase in the global human population from now on ad infinitum. Using a simple compound-interest calculation, how many millennia will it take till the aggregate body mass of humans will expand faster than the speed of light?
Thus all hail hierarchical cultural diffusion, at least as far as fertility is concerned.
Yes, in the long run our universe can't sustain any particular positive exponential growth rate. But that's not at all our problem now, or anytime soon.
If it is our problem now or not is the Big Question of our time, that’s for sure.
If UN projections are roughly right, the global population will level out somewhere between 11 and 14 billion and then start to decline. Those left will be increasingly skewed toward the old, like present-day Japan and worse.
I have more than a hunch that we disagree, but I predict we can live quite well with that. Hear me out: Even when ageing, world population will be so large that there will still be a “critical mass” of young people that can drive innovations. Perhaps even helping us, or more realistically our AI “children”, to reach some of the stars (for those who think that is a worthwhile goal).
It helps maintaining a critical mass of innovators in an ageing world that the young will even more than today converge in big cities. (Urbanization is also a global trend, alongside fertility decline.) Add to this that an ever-larger percentage of tomorrow’s young will inherit stuff. Never before in human history will so few receive so much inheritance from so many grandparents. That will free up time for the creative among them to invent and design exciting new stuff.
No doubt it will be a bumpy ride. But human history has always been a bumpy ride. Expect more regional wars, as the Rest increasingly catches up economically with the West (which is yet another global trend).
Also, the countries that go through the demographic transition last, will be the first in the new world. Implying that the 22nd century will be Africa’s century. More than 700 million are projected in Nigeria alone, in 2100. And they will be relatively young, compared to the still somewhat more numerous Chinese at that time (something like 900 million). We will simply have to accept the coming massive shifts in the world’s population centers with a stiff upper lip.
And hey, Nigerians is one of the most successful ethnic groups in the US! And although there is obviously a selection effect there, we should expect much of the many future bright young Africans, from the Last Young Continent on Earth. (Until even Africa goes the same way as East Asia, probably around 2200.)
Pity that none of those who read today’s blogs will be around to experience the bright new lights of the future, though...
Again, we are likely to disagree, but I assume we agree that no other question is more important in today’s - and tomorrow's - world.
Peaceful cultures can change quickly, especially through force by outsiders. This is why we will not see an Amish future. If everything stayed still, high fertility religious groups who reject technology would inherit large parts of the earth. But when empires begin to falter -- in this case the US empire -- groups like the Amish will likely be dispersed and displaced by other, more aggressive groups.
The Amish could quickly turn to aggression when needed. I predict the Haredim will do that first, as they will come to dominate Israel in a half century, which has many hostile neighbors.
We've seen large cultural changes happen in periods of decades in the past. Surely the Amish won't have replaced everybody in 50 or 100 years. But I agree that hoping for a drift to turn around quickly is not much of a course of action.
My prediction is that the current maladaptive dead-end culture of the decadent West will crash hard (time scale obviously hard to predict) in a way that leaves it impoverished and discredited, but not utterly destroyed. That way more resilient cultural attitudes (and yes, religions) will gain strength and new adherents, allowing renewed growth without a need for the insularity you often point to.
I recognize that you are trying to use 'drift' in a neutral way, but it's not so clear that we can always determine in the present when a particular cultural change is going to be adaptive or maladaptive. How many people. for example, thought China's one-child policy was a relatively good idea at the time it was first adopted?
Alternatively, the average effect shouldn't matter as long as the standard deviation is high. In which case, fast cultural drift is actually good, so long as it isn't homogenous. That's exactly what your call for more cults is, isn't it?
If there were enough cultures at any one time, that might create sufficient cultural evolution. But Just high variance of each step for one culture, that doesn't do it.
If I understand the problem you are expressing, it is that it is desirable to have a balance between cultural adaptation and cultural selection. Otherwise we get a cultural/population boom-and-bust cycle.
The relationship between adaptation and selection is analogous to interest rates, and the balance can be maintained by some kind of organization that attempts to manipulate the balance in order to try and smooth out the culture cycles, like the federal reserve. A high adaptation regime might be something like a low-interest rate regime where people invest in relatively risky business opportunities.
When the Fed wants to manipulate interest rates it has a few tools at it's disposal, but what kind of tools exist to regulate a cultural interest rate? Would these tools be cultural or financial in nature?
Your futuarchy model as outline seems like a way to reduce the adaptation rate, but really we want a method that can be used to either increase or decrease the rate as needed. For example, let's say we apportioned representation in the House of Representatives based on a net present population of a political units using a dynamic discount rate.
You're confusing the noise for the signal. Actual cultural change happens very slowly, but there are wild gyrations in the meantime (aka noise). A lot of conformity or change that you see is just superficial, to fit in with the prevailing fashion. Fashion, which changes on a dime, is not the same as culture.
There's no point as an intellectual steering fashion, unless you're trying to sell a lot of transient stuff. But even then, you're better off just following the fashion, and following again when it changes again, rather than try to steer it. Even artists don't get to steer fashion until (for many of them) they're dead.
Most of the things you're worried about is just the peak of a generational bubble, and it's about to crash on its own. Whether you're in the middle of a dot-com, subprime mortagage or crypto bubble, it seems like the madness will go on forever. Afterwards, you wonder how people could have ever thought that way.
Even from a rationalist point of view, the better explanation for young people having less children is because they sense that the world's carrying capacity is being stretched. But this is an illusion caused by Boomers occupying all the prime spots in the modern capitalist resource distribution nodes and refusing to surrender them (from their POV, they're individualistic in orientation, so why should they?!).
But time cures all. When there are less Boomers taking those spots, purely via the passage of time, younger generations will sense there's more opportunity / the world has more carrying capacity, and fertility rates will naturally tick up. Equlibrium in action over many generations, not in a single generation.
From the point of view of humanity, the plight of single generations is noise, a blip. Forcing too much selection to occur in a single generation will gum up the works, because people just aren't that flexible. They're stuck to their ways, and will glom onto a superficial "overfitted" solution. Declaring that to be the best for all generations to-come is the surest way to cause multi-generational harm.
Generational change will bring discontinuous change that you can't project just based on selection or incentives. That's what usually trips up forecasters.
I'd speculate that it's even true for AI training. AI training that keeps working on recursively iterating a single model rather than periodically starting from fresh and retraining from scratch will end up glomming on a dead end solution. You're treating your current prevailing view of The Culture like that mono-model, rather than each future generation training a new one.
A new model that only superficially matches the old, **while it is still being graded by the old**. Once the old model is no longer grading the new one, the new one will starting churning out its own weirdness / hallucinations. Past performance is no guarantee of future results (so they say).
A cultural regime that continues on its existing track, while being graded by the same authorities, will probably continue on as you project. But that will not be the case when played out in time.
We have seen large changes in cultural values that have been sustained, and did not quickly reverse. See, eg, https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/we-can-buy-new-culture
They didn't quickly reverse, because reversals mainly happen at the changing of power among generations (Generational Regime Change). The last 30 years have been dominated by Boomers staying in charge (e.g. average senator age increasing by 9 years from 1980 to now, 2 80 yr olds running against each other for president, literally the same 2 guys who could have/did run in the 1990s).
You'll see significant cultural change from the exit of the Boomers, particularly on the fertility issue. The current decrease in fertility is mainly created by Boomers, both spiritually (from their values / lifestyles) and materially (taking all the resources & advantages for their own generation over others).
It's fitting. The 20th century saw the world go from 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6 billion by 2000, the US from 70 million to 280 million. If anything we've had a long 20th century population growth boom (unprecedented in 10k years of human history) that we're now seeing the flip side of. Boomers themselves were the very product of this boom, and in their lifetime, brought about the trend's reversal.
The 20th century boom influenced the their lifestyle & values & choices, which are now proven not to be sustainable to the next generations. It won't last beyond them, because the next generation(s) experienced far more of the downsides than the upsides of it. (Plus the upsides they did experience, they mostly take for granted, like all generations).
No one, even among the Boomers, still feel like the whole package of the "Boomer way of life" can be just passed on unchanged from the Boomers to the next generations. So the culture of future won't be a straight-forward projection of the current trends of Boomer culture.
As Boomers no longer occupy the "grading" position of culture (the power/money/influence to determine & incentivize what's "good" or "bad"), you'll start to see people realize that none of the current cultural "mandates" are really mandatory, "taboos" may not be so forbidden, and you'll see some surprising quick reversals to the private preferences of the next generations.
For fertility, it still won't be that quick (due to biological realities), but it'll happen in a generation. For other issues, it'll happen in a few years. Some of it has already happened, as trends we thought were locked-in or already decided, turn out not to be case.
That people even discuss fertility as an issue is a sign of declining Boomer influence. In their hey-day, fertility was a quintessential personal individual choice, and not amenable to cultural pressure. People used to laugh at Singapore for over-emphasizing such things.
I actually quite liked the first part of your critique of this piece in your first post, re: fashion vs. culture. But imo your argument has now degraded to being an apparently somewhat bitter Gen Xer who feels defeated by a “Boomer” glass ceiling within your organization preventing your further ascension within the hierarchy, and you’ve turned this into a fundamental societal structural issue.
On the fertility point, though, you are clearly off the mark. One of Robin’s main points is that the culture has changed so much that not only is it obvious that fertility is below replacement and getting lower in all rich Western countries - the facts are the facts here - with governance (e.g. Social Security/Medicare) playing an important contributory role, and that it will be very difficult to change this even with government policy changes.
Thanks. I'm glad the first part of the critique resonated. I do think we shouldn't extrapolate the trends too much from the last gasp of Boomerdom that's happening right now, since I expect a reversal, much like a "blowoff top" in the financial markets.
As for your reactions. You're correct I don't like what you call the Boomer "glass ceiling", but I'm not sure more Xers moving up would have impacted fertility. Xers are also very individualistic culturally, and on the issue of fertility policy would not be that different than Boomers.
But I wouldn't call it as a "glass ceiling", as much as a filter, ensuring Xers getting promoted generally are of a certain mold. Boomers like ideological fealty and so Xers getting promoted either (pretend to) strongly support one of the Boomer ideological camps, or be strenuously neutral in the Culture Wars. That means no organic change, from people just being somewhat different than those older than them due to natural shuffling. This translates into reduced cultural evolutionary change
This I argue, more than technology, is what has maintained the cultural stasis of the last 30 years. That's why we love retro and nostalgia as a culture now. Why we essentially still have (the retainers of) House Clinton vs (the retainers of) House Bush in our political game of thrones.
As to fertility in particular, I agree it won't reverse all the way, nor should one want it to. The 20th century had a huge population growth and I'm not sure the earth can support indefinite continuation of that growth pattern. But I do share the concern about it dropping too low as well, and would like to see some reversal to a healthier equilibrium. Which I think it will. Xers won't block political / cultural attempts to increase fertility levels, but it will take time before results are manifested into the real world.
I don't share your concern about our governance troubles stopping this. With the diminishing influence of the Boomers, I expect governance to improve as well. That'll be part and parcel of the generational transition to Millenials. It definitely won't be a governance utopia, but the governance problems will be of a different type than those we're currently used to, which are characteristic of patterns of Boomer discourse and power struggles.
For example, I believe the effect of political polarization will decrease over time, in terms of preventing government action. Although the press doesn't see it, I believe "Polarization" as a political problem has already peaked.
Xer politicians don't mind political trading, even if they don't agree and aren't on the same side. Nor are they united enough to hold the line against it -- either side of the aisle. You see the Hastert Rule has already been thrown out of the window several times in the last few years, each time to great surprise from the media.
The Hastert Rule itself is ridiculous press fiction. It isn't a real rule, was applied incorrectly by its own terms, and wasn't even first adopted by Dennis Hastert. Who himself is a politician with enough personal problems, that for the Republican party's own sake, the less is mentioned the better. I'm waiting for future generations to laugh at the pose that the Hastert Rule is what stops a great democracy from doing what we need to do. But it's how the press chose to describes an Old Boomer power dynamic, turning it into a real thing for the last 20+ years.
Similarly the federal government neglected infrastructure & industrial policy for years, but the last few years have made the plunge. It's a bi-partisan change in mindset. You can argue that it was because of COVID, but I'd argue it's just as much due to generational differences. All politicians love to throw money, but Xer politicians would rather throw money at real physical things (even if it misses the mark sometimes) rather than furiously plugging the holes of the System which is Already Great.
Regarding fertility, Millenials don't feel as queasy having the govt setting or meddling with social norms, compared with Boomers and Xers. The same generational factors that lets "woke"-ness become a movement when young, will allow them to happily meddle with reproductive social norms and promote fertility when older. The exact content of the culture they're promoting at any moment is less consequential than them willing to see it as a lever that the government can pull or the culture can influence.
As you're astute enough to deduce I'm an Xer, I am curious to your views on how I see the near future playing out. Also, I want to know more about what you mean by Social Security / Medicare "playing an important contributory role". What structural forces do you see would stop a reversal due to generational turnover?
“ As to fertility in particular, I agree it won't reverse all the way, nor should one want it to”
Forgetting everything else, if you don’t want the Ponzi-scheme that is the generous welfare state (Social Security and Medicare in the U.S. for the old, Medicaid for the poor) to collapse, you need economic growth, not economic decline. Which is what you’ll get eventually from far-below-replacement fertility.
It’s true that the U.S. will weather this problem better than all other rich countries because of our ability to attract and “integrate”/assimilate immigrants, but we will eventually have the problem too, and our allies and trading partners is Europe and Asia will face the problems far sooner.
Second, if one’s morality leads one to think (as mine does) that more of the world’s poor billions deserve the chance to lead lives at least as good economically as the U.S. lower middle class does today, we need continued economic growth to achieve this, and the U.S. is the lead dog of the world’s economic engine. Economics is a positive sum game, not a negative one, and more intelligent, *productive* humans on the planet living in good cultures/civilizations has been demonstrated as by far the best way to pull the world’s poor out of poverty (with literally the only meaningful exception to this ever being authoritarian China implementing positive-sum capitalist economic practices to pull hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty).
Well, had you written the above 10 or 15 years ago, I’d probably agree with most of it (and likely neither of us would pay any attention whatsoever to the fertility issue).
As it is, here in 2024 I disagree with most of your premises. Whatever was the case for the two decades prior, we’ve had nothing like cultural stasis in the U.S. (and likely the developed world, though I claim no actual expertise or authority there) for the last 10 years. And there is little to nothing left of the Houses of Clinton or Bush running our country and institutions. It is the House of Obama that is literally (old sense of that term, not the new “figurative” sense) running the White House now, and the Obamians, the SJWs and some actual radicals that are driving institutions, narratives and most of policy on the left, even if/where it is nominally Boomers who were previously sympatico with Clintonistas still at the top of some of these institutions.
And while Clinton was as or more despicable than Trump in his personal affairs, and while I had numerous issues with the Bushes, on both the policy and culture front in most ways IMO our country would be *much* better off if indeed things were still driven by the Clintons on the left and the Bushes on the right. Imperfect though our institutions and society may have been and still are, we were much better off in aggregate with their agendas and policies than with what we have today.
Now on an operational basis, you and I very much disagree re the wisdom of the “Hastert rule” if you want a well- functioning political party, but Trump - even if I very much *do* approve of some of his changes/disregard of certain norms - is unlikely to maintain this one going forward if it serves his agenda, more’s the pity. IIRC Mitch McConnell no longer follows it in the Senate, if he ever did. But in any case, this is a tactical operations issue, not a strategic or policy one.
On the future and fertility, imo we likely agree that this will be a far lesser, even non-existent, issue in the U.S. for the next 20-30 years, mainly because our country is practically unique in being able to attract and absorb immigrants. And if we can ever get to a sane policy of minimizing illegal immigration, we will have little trouble having good, and as large as necessary, legal immigration. Other countries will face the problems much sooner. I was shocked when I saw that South Korea’s fertility rate is down to 0.80.
Re: fertility, my point about social safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare is no more and no less the conventional one that absent such a safety net, children are historically seen as “producer goods” and one’s solution to comfort and security in old age, where with the existence of a state-provided fairly financially generous social safety net for the old, children are now viewed as “consumer goods”. But while I have no doubt whatsoever that these programs are *a* major factor in fertility rate, I certainly would not suggest they are the only reasons, nor would I suggest removing them for the purpose of increasing the fertility rate even if one could somehow imagine that this were actually an option politically.
As for your other projections on the future re Millenials in power, I dearly hope you are correct, but I fear you are not. The current snowflake radicalism on campus, and recent polls showing that roughly half of 18-24 year olds chose “Back Hamas” in the Israel-Hamas conflict, even when given 3 choices (older millennials were also bad, but not nearly as bad), does not leave me optimistic about the morals and values of the current generation.
Thanks I appreciate the perspective and the elaboration.
What I'm saying is that the "snowflake radicalism" syndrome is almost entirely a reaction to Boomer dominance, and the Millenial's perceived need to maintain the sacredness of Boomer values while challenging it. They're trying to out-Boomer the Boomers and not really succeeding (but I'll give them credit for getting more traction than the Xers).
Millenials won't act like that when they get older. I believe they'll be more like the GIs. It's not a matter of them "growing up" -- they have different generational characteristics than the Boomer generation.
That's why some may consider their current behavior off-putting, because we haven't seen these characteristics en-masse in a long time. Not being a Millenial myself, I consider some of it off-putting as well, but I prefer it to more Boomer behaviors, which has stretched society well past its breaking point.
So I predict under a Millenial approach (when older), fertility issues won't be solved just by immigration (which can help) but also by cultural changes that promotes traditional families, a stay at home caregiving parent, and boosts the prestige of having multiple kids. You already see these cultural changes trending among the top 1%-5% now, which over time will be copied by those lower on the econ hierarchy.
I agree that Millenials will likely boost social safety nets, but I disagree that will have a negative impact on the fertility issue. In our society, children are too fickle to be reliable producer goods. It's more likely family & kids will end up being seen as *mandatory* consumer goods, and Millenial policy will encourage overspending on them, and provide govt subsidies to do so.
Taking GI's as an historical analogy. GI as they got older returned to a more traditional conception of society, against the social trends of their youth in the early 20th century (which was more "progressive" and "woke" than the mid 20th century). GI's promoted all sorts of consumption (and provided subsidies) to maintain standards of living to a what they felt was a normative level.
GIs and Boomers both enjoy government spending per their values -- the difference I see is GI's subsidized people to live to a norm (set by GIs in charge), while Boomers subsidized people to live "differently" (as part of that individual's expressive freedom). In this regard, Millenials love to declare social norms, and are more like GIs than Boomers.
The GI worldview eventially caused its own problems with conformity and overlimiting free choice (Millenials will run into their own similar overreach). These problems were rightly critiqued by the Boomers when young. But there are inherent trade-offs among all values, and Boomers just set it at the other extreme. Although it's fine as counterbalance, you can't keep doing it forever.
I recognize that this is a prediction of the future, and not an argument based on an assessment of the recent past. So I can't prove it'll happen with rigorous logic. Time will tell though. If you're willing to entertain that different generations have different thought patterns, and they're formed more in reaction to those of the previous generation rather than as a mere continuation of it, then you can see how this is possible.
I'm writing this out, more as a marker, so I can look back later on if my analysis was right or not. Also to get some immediate pushback to sharpen my thinking if something seems obviously wrong.
Like you say, neither of us would have been arguing about fertility 10 to 15 years ago, which is a sign that the discourse has shifted. Reproductive choice / family formation freedom is one of most sacred in the Boomer hierarchy of values, and now people are willing to discuss consequences and tradeoffs.
I've not read all your work on the fertility crisis, but I'm wondering if you've considered the possibility of the production and rearing of children being exported to the state instead of being firmly within the realm of the individual?
Many of the scenarios I imagine lead me to believe there will be an adoption of artificial wombs and genetic selection which, admittedly, would be a radically different world than we currently live in and would likely fail in it's implementation. I just don't see many ways to escape the Moloch-Style games we are currently experiencing in regards to fertility and see exporting these features of our civilization to a imagined bureaucratic-super-ai that removes the "human" components from our civilizations future & planning.
Industrial scale orphanages are indeed a possible approach.
What deep values, exactly, are you defending? Apparently not the right to think for yourself, to think critically, to challenge convention, to do as you please as long as you aren't hurting someone.
Those are some of my deepest values, I think some of the deepest values of anyone who really tries to be rational. But if you wish to restrict what ideas people are allowed to have and require them to adhere to some traditional culture unquestioningly, then you're opposed to them. As are these fertile cults you talk about. They thrive on restricting critical thinking and independence of thought. That's the only way they can get people to accept their peculiar mythology.
Seek the truth freely, or die trying.
I'm asking what deep values can prevent civilization collapse.
That would mean your real deep value is "prevent civilization collapse." But that can't be, because you actually advocate civilization collapse as a means to an end:
> Obviously, one option is to “turn back the clock.” If we somehow bombed our world back to very low tech, with bad travel and comm tech, and much poverty, disease, and war, that would probably soon ensure sufficient cultural diversity and selection. But only until tech rose again to our level.
Look, if you truly think Western free-thinking civilization is doomed and the Amish will inherit the planet, then what's the actual problem from your perspective? If the Amish are going to win anyway, then you get what you wanted, world population will rise again after it falls, and no advocacy is necessary on your part. And you seem to be willing to accept that outcome. So what are you worrying about, what is the problem you are trying to solve? Why would it be necessary or desirable for the rest of us to be more like the Amish, centuries before the Amish will win anyway?
How is this not clear? I'd rather avoid civilization collapse, if possible. I don't at all advocate collapse.
> as long as you aren't hurting someone.
Of course, anything you want to forbid can and will be construed as “hurting someone”. People feel hurt all the time when they don’t like your actions, your words, your looks or—what they believe to be—your thoughts, and they don’t hesitate to retaliate when they think they can get away with it.
I see that the title is "How Fix Cultural Drift". Is there any way that you'd consider changing the title to "How to Fix Cultural Drift"?
> ensure that the world encompasses sufficient cultural variety and selection pressures for cultural evolution to function effectively,
> the only other option I can see is to find a way to selectively restrain and control cultural evolution. To somehow distinguish adaptive from maladaptive cultural changes, and organize to sufficiently encourage the former while discouraging the latter.
a major problem is that the second approach actively undermines attempts at the first. so as people defect it become a self reenforcing maxima trading off resiliency for efficiency. This seems to have become the default dominant approach for the last century in many varied flavors...
Of course, culture drifts via memetic drift just as DNA genes drift via genetic drift. However that doesn't mean you can simply invoke drift to explain why some cultural changes are maladaptive to their human hosts. Once, long ago some aspects of culture were somewhat more aligned to the interests of their human hosts because they were passed vertically down the human generations. These days memes are often transmitted horizontally (with respect to host generations) - rather like parasites are. This means that their interests and those of their hosts need no longer be aligned. This makes the whole situation worse. If it was just memetic drift we were dealing with, we could simply apply selection to restore the original culture. However, the changes are probably not made passively - as a drift hypothesis would imply. It is likely that they actively help the associated memes propagate themselves. If you push on the culture it is likely to push back.
For example, in the case of fertility, the problem is not that culture changed in a random maladaptive direction. Instead, resources not spent on gene propagation can be spent on meme propagation. It is in the common interests of many memes to sterilize their human hosts. Then instead of nursing babies, they will be freed up to post to social media and inspire the next generation - if there is one. This is not a story about memetic drift. Rather DNA genes are fighting with memes over resources.
I agree that there is a problem, but I think you are possibly over pessimistic - I do not see that cultural selection pressures are weaker than they used to be, largely because there is so much more mixing. It is indeed possible that this leads to a homogenisation around maladaptive norms - but this homogenisation seems unlikely without a central authority to enforce it (examples would be welcome). Without enforced conformity, I expect we would have a faster rebound (in terms of population) than you would predict.
Furthermore, if you are correct about imitation of high status people being key (seems reasonable), then the big factor to watch is not overall cultural drift / competition, but elite trends. I think there is some cause for optimism. The big risk here remains that elites are incentivised to have fewer, 'high quality' children. However the ability to pass-on elite status seems at best no stronger than in the past, and low fertility pressures should be somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that new elites will be increasingly likely to come from high fertility subcultures (n.b. data should be available here), as well as the reduction in 'stasis bias' making it much easier to create new 'elite niches' within culture - once again, these elites will bias towards high fertility.
Tl;dr - I think there is enough competition within the system for error correction to be faster than OP.
What do you think of the hypothesis by biological analogy that governments are fundamentally parasites at the heart of all cultures and that the industrial revolution over-fed these parasites and they now have an excessively net negative impact on the cultural hosts and are incentivizing the centralization and totalization of a decaying culture?
Also, minor typo:
> they we all get better at fishing
Typo fixed; thanks. Not sure why exactly more govt, even if bad on other grounds, would be the main cause of culture drift.
It seems that the size/influence of governments is highly correlated with culture drift. Correlation != causation, but what else has higher correlation? It seems that hypothesizing causes of culture drift would help to hypothesize solutions and/or avoid future cultural evolutionary dead-ends.
As an example, Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union seems like a great micro-example of culture drift of an entire scientific field within a country due directly to government. Not easy to extrapolate from such a clear example, but seems plausible to extrapolate.
FWIW, I find the term "drift" confusing here. Drift implies movement in random directions, but what you appear to be worried about is a form of cultural lock-in, which seems like the opposite of drift.
This semantic confusion might point to a deeper conceptual problem - cultural evolution is a complex system with feedback loops operating on multiple levels. It's very hard to accurately predict the future trajectory of such systems. Does culture express our values? Embody them? Safeguard them? Distort them? Threaten them? Or is culture itself the domain in which we figure out what our values actually are? And therefore it doesn't even make sense to think of them as separate forces that can be in opposition? I think it's very hard to say.
This topic seems dangerously close to the kind of far mode steering you've cautioned about in the past. Better to steer firmly away from nearby, concrete disasters, and otherwise keep a light hand on the tiller and enjoy the ride, say I.
Random "drift" need not have a mean zero. Yes changes are hard to predict. The main issue is: how adaptive is it plausible to think changes are, on average?
Yes, to see this problem one must see abstractly to an important degree. If you aren't willing to do that, it will be hard for you to see the problem
> If we somehow bombed our world back to very low tech, with bad travel and comm tech, and much poverty, disease, and war, that would probably soon ensure sufficient cultural diversity and selection. But only until tech rose again to our level.
Maybe that rise can be prevented? If we preëmptively squander enough non-renewable natural resources before the bombing, at least we’ll ensure future humans will have a much harder time building a technologically advanced civilization, and its development certainly won’t follow the now-unavailable path it did the first time around. And they’ll probably be pretty pissed off if they ever discover what we did.
Typo nitpicking:
> they we all get better
Fertility decline is arguably one of those rare cases where individual irrationality turns into collective rationality, rather than the other way around.
Since if humans do not voluntarily stop population growth, Naure will sooner or later do if for us. And probably not in a pleasant way.
And for the record: The stars, even assuming we could reach a large number of them (highly unlikely, to put it mildly) cannot be a solution. It can only be a temporary stopgap measure . Here is a math excercise: Assume for the sake of argument a 0.5 percent annual increase in the global human population from now on ad infinitum. Using a simple compound-interest calculation, how many millennia will it take till the aggregate body mass of humans will expand faster than the speed of light?
Thus all hail hierarchical cultural diffusion, at least as far as fertility is concerned.
Yes, in the long run our universe can't sustain any particular positive exponential growth rate. But that's not at all our problem now, or anytime soon.
If it is our problem now or not is the Big Question of our time, that’s for sure.
If UN projections are roughly right, the global population will level out somewhere between 11 and 14 billion and then start to decline. Those left will be increasingly skewed toward the old, like present-day Japan and worse.
I have more than a hunch that we disagree, but I predict we can live quite well with that. Hear me out: Even when ageing, world population will be so large that there will still be a “critical mass” of young people that can drive innovations. Perhaps even helping us, or more realistically our AI “children”, to reach some of the stars (for those who think that is a worthwhile goal).
It helps maintaining a critical mass of innovators in an ageing world that the young will even more than today converge in big cities. (Urbanization is also a global trend, alongside fertility decline.) Add to this that an ever-larger percentage of tomorrow’s young will inherit stuff. Never before in human history will so few receive so much inheritance from so many grandparents. That will free up time for the creative among them to invent and design exciting new stuff.
No doubt it will be a bumpy ride. But human history has always been a bumpy ride. Expect more regional wars, as the Rest increasingly catches up economically with the West (which is yet another global trend).
Also, the countries that go through the demographic transition last, will be the first in the new world. Implying that the 22nd century will be Africa’s century. More than 700 million are projected in Nigeria alone, in 2100. And they will be relatively young, compared to the still somewhat more numerous Chinese at that time (something like 900 million). We will simply have to accept the coming massive shifts in the world’s population centers with a stiff upper lip.
And hey, Nigerians is one of the most successful ethnic groups in the US! And although there is obviously a selection effect there, we should expect much of the many future bright young Africans, from the Last Young Continent on Earth. (Until even Africa goes the same way as East Asia, probably around 2200.)
Pity that none of those who read today’s blogs will be around to experience the bright new lights of the future, though...
Again, we are likely to disagree, but I assume we agree that no other question is more important in today’s - and tomorrow's - world.
Peaceful cultures can change quickly, especially through force by outsiders. This is why we will not see an Amish future. If everything stayed still, high fertility religious groups who reject technology would inherit large parts of the earth. But when empires begin to falter -- in this case the US empire -- groups like the Amish will likely be dispersed and displaced by other, more aggressive groups.
The Amish could quickly turn to aggression when needed. I predict the Haredim will do that first, as they will come to dominate Israel in a half century, which has many hostile neighbors.
Why won't cultural drift drift back to a higher reproduction rate?
It might eventually. But before then the Amish etc will replaced them.
We've seen large cultural changes happen in periods of decades in the past. Surely the Amish won't have replaced everybody in 50 or 100 years. But I agree that hoping for a drift to turn around quickly is not much of a course of action.
My prediction is that the current maladaptive dead-end culture of the decadent West will crash hard (time scale obviously hard to predict) in a way that leaves it impoverished and discredited, but not utterly destroyed. That way more resilient cultural attitudes (and yes, religions) will gain strength and new adherents, allowing renewed growth without a need for the insularity you often point to.
I recognize that you are trying to use 'drift' in a neutral way, but it's not so clear that we can always determine in the present when a particular cultural change is going to be adaptive or maladaptive. How many people. for example, thought China's one-child policy was a relatively good idea at the time it was first adopted?
I'm talking about the average effect, so don't need a way distinguish individual cases.
Alternatively, the average effect shouldn't matter as long as the standard deviation is high. In which case, fast cultural drift is actually good, so long as it isn't homogenous. That's exactly what your call for more cults is, isn't it?
If there were enough cultures at any one time, that might create sufficient cultural evolution. But Just high variance of each step for one culture, that doesn't do it.
If I understand the problem you are expressing, it is that it is desirable to have a balance between cultural adaptation and cultural selection. Otherwise we get a cultural/population boom-and-bust cycle.
The relationship between adaptation and selection is analogous to interest rates, and the balance can be maintained by some kind of organization that attempts to manipulate the balance in order to try and smooth out the culture cycles, like the federal reserve. A high adaptation regime might be something like a low-interest rate regime where people invest in relatively risky business opportunities.
When the Fed wants to manipulate interest rates it has a few tools at it's disposal, but what kind of tools exist to regulate a cultural interest rate? Would these tools be cultural or financial in nature?
Your futuarchy model as outline seems like a way to reduce the adaptation rate, but really we want a method that can be used to either increase or decrease the rate as needed. For example, let's say we apportioned representation in the House of Representatives based on a net present population of a political units using a dynamic discount rate.
Futarchy can adjust policy toward achieving any goal you can measure after the fact.