Global fertility and the climate crisis

Foreign Affairs has an interesting article on “The Age of Depopulation: Surviving a World Gone Gray“.

It describes several hypotheses for explaining the reduced fertility rates and falling populations almost all over the world, but emphasizes that women simply voluntarily don’t want to have as many children:

Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.

Personally, I wonder if the ecological crisis is a major background psychological cause. To everyone who is paying attention, the unambiguous message from scientists and policy experts is that we are destroying our own civilization and the capacity of the Earth to support us through our selfish and short-sighted determination to turn burning hydrocarbons into dollars. Even when it comes to my own life, I am profoundly afraid that prosperous, open, and advanced societies will cease to exist as the ecological basis for our entire civilization collapses. I think there is a decent chance – if I live until 2060 or so – that the young people in that time will look at photos of the produce sections in our supermarkets and be unwilling to accept that they were ever real: that we had so much bounty, such tremendous gifts from nature, and we squandered it all because we allowed psychopaths to rule us. It’s even worse than that in democratic societies: we demanded that psychopaths rule us, because we are unwilling to accept the truth of our situation.

Having children when you expect the future to be chaos demands an even greater act of faith from prospective parents. I would say that if we do want more children (which is questionable) we need to stop acting as though the future is something which we can and should destroy for the sake of our near-term ease and convenience.

Related:

Two October trips

This is going to be a packed month.

For Thanksgiving weekend, I am going on a camping trip with friends to do some trail repair near Temagami.

Then, from the 24th to 27th, I am photographing a diplomatic conference in Montreal.

Both will require a fair bit of packing and preparation, and I expect a week or so of evenings spent post-processing the Montreal photos after work when I return.

US security assurances and nuclear weapon proliferation

Although France has historically been the only case of an insurance hedger opting for an independent deterrent, there is no guarantee it will be the last. Under President Trump’s leadership, significant doubts about America’s commitment to both Europe and East Asia led to growing concerns that the United States may not indefinitely remain a reliable and credible provider of extended deterrence—concerns that may remain long after the Trump administration as allies fear abandonment temptations could one day return to the White House. Burden-sharing disputes with NATO, Japan, and South Korea, and efforts to reduce America’s conventional footprint—a key indicator of its commitment to its allies—have led to questions in Germany about whether it requires a substitute to American extended deterrence, and similar discussions at least privately in Japan and South Korea among some domestic constituencies. Doubts about the reliability of America’s commitment to extended deterrence came to a boil under President Trump, who was at times perceived by allies such as South Korea as being willing to throw partners under the bus in pursuit of hisown policy objectives, such as a deal with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The experience has the potential to revive debates about independent deterrents in America’s long-time allies—and not just for instrumental reasons to elicit stronger reassurance from Washington to hedge against future incarnations of Trumpism that seeks to retrench America’s commitments back home.

Narang, Vipin. Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation. Princeton University Press, 2022. p. 298

Related:

September rain

Today was unusually draining.

I rode in through the rain, skipping breakfast to give myself more time to sleep / cycle a little slower; then didn’t feel the allure of BBQ food so skipped lunch; then got caught up in a too-long task which became overly too long because of the hunger and tiredness.

I also keep seeing event notifications for ghost rides for newly slain cyclists — sometimes with the galling euphemism/evasion “bicycle accident”, when crashes involving just bicycles are seldom fatal and what is generally being left unsaid for politeness in these notices is “killed by a car”.

Still, I rode home safely, made a nice meal, and am progressing toward feeling capable of handling life’s affronts.

Milan Ilnyckyj Policy on Sincere Invitations

Please believe that this post is not prompted by any recent incident, but rather by something I have long observed and recently had some clarifying conversations about.

I have always been vexed and perplexed by insincere invitations of all kinds, when done out of politeness or as a kind of social reflex: “You must come to the house for lunch sometime…”

I do not like not knowing if a sincere offer is being made, and I do not like following up to have the offering party just awkwardly never get to the point of saying that an invitation had not been sincere.

For the benefit of my friends, colleagues, and relations, I will briefly and simply enunciate my own policy so that you may understand what an invitation from me means:

My invitations are sincere.

Specifically, they are not insincere in that I am not actually proposing to do the thing suggested. If I suggest having lunch sometime, I do really mean to break out calendars and arrange and execute such a plan. If you say yes and the fates allow, there will be lunch.

They are also not insincere in the sense of being a coded signal for something else. I am curious about a limitless number of things, so if I suggest we take a walk sometime and have a detailed discussion on some subject, or take a bike ride around the city, or whatever – I do actually, literally, specifically mean we should do those things.

Thank you for your attention.