The vanishing of youth - aeon
Long time, no post.
Victor Kumar writes about how smaller populations deprive societies of theur most vital creative force: young people. In this reading of reality, population growth is both the result and the cause of progress.
When societies are large and interconnected, they’re able to generate new ideas, recombine old ideas in new ways, and forge new divisions of cognitive labour. A smaller population will thus shrink what the evolutionary theorist Joseph Henrich in The Secret of Our Success (2015) calls our ‘collective brain’. We’ll forgo not just particular innovations but entire fields of enquiry, impacting everything from basic research to practical applications in engineering and medicine. New technologies could potentially sustain economic productivity, but that will be harder if a shrinking population is technologically less innovative.
Young people aren’t just members of society’s collective brain; they’re its most innovative neurons. Most breakthrough discoveries come from younger researchers and entrepreneurs. Social progress, similarly, depends on young people rejecting prevailing bigotry and replacing older generations. For example, support for same-sex marriage is higher among Gen X and Millennials than in older generations. If the proportion of young people declines, so will our moral and political values.
You think we live in a decaying gerontocracy now? Just wait.
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An ageing society will become risk-averse, focused on preserving wealth rather than creating it, and resistant to necessary change.
He proposed some solutions --
First, we should undertake policy and cultural interventions that make sense independently of their impact on fertility. Expanded parental leave, subsidised childcare and pronatal tax policies would support caregivers even if they didn’t boost fertility rates. Likewise, increasing the supply of housing would benefit those suffering from poverty or homelessness. Beyond that, we have every reason to encourage men to contribute more to childcare, make parenting less intensive, and redesign workplaces to be more family-friendly. These interventions offer clear benefits with minimal downside risk.
Second, we should invest in researching and testing more ambitious and radical approaches, from cultural innovations surrounding cooperative parenting to technological revolutions in assisted reproduction. Perhaps the most effective solutions, ultimately, will relieve the costs of childrearing through artificial wombs or AI nannies. Let scientists and policy experts explore bold approaches while ensuring rigorous evaluation of their effects. Ask politicians, humanists and the general public to critically discuss them.
I'm going to be honest: I think artificial wombs are many, many decades away. I worked in the field of tissue engineering for several years and despite the hype around stem cells around the turn of the century we remain unable to reproduce the conditions necessary to differentiate even simple tissues in vitro. Building an entire organs, and organisms, is several orders of magnitude more complex than that. I also think that childcare roles will be among the last to be replaced by AI.