I think it's gonna be fine. The capital per person (capital deepening) will be great. Things that prove hard to automate will suffer — maybe elder care can't be automated and will go to shit — but a lot of stuff can be automated.
Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.
And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate.
But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society.
For what it's worth, I'm also a single gay man and think similarly at times about the path not taken, and why I chose not to adopt as I had originally planned in my 20s. It sucks, but I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed. Society needs more than just parents in order for children to thrive, and I believe queer folk are ideally suited to fill in a lot of those roles.
As for my comments on sex specifically, I'll admit I'm speaking through the perspective of someone who A) doesn't have it in order to procreate, and B) has a healthier relationship with it than many of my own peers might. It's not solely an act of procreation or hedonism, but it can fill both roles - though I will only ever know it from the perspective of pleasure alone.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts like that. Thank you.
Disclaimer: my thought process tends to be somewhat autistic, I don’t mean any offense. As a non gay man I am just curious to hear your perspective.
From a strictly biological perspective, I think it could be argued that gay “sex” isn’t actually sex. Like, what makes it sex? Is it sex for pleasure? Or is it something adjacent to sex? That has some commonalities with sex, but isn’t actually sex. Like there is a part of sex missing from the equation. Why do we still call it sex?
I kind of assume it’s the kind of thing hardly anyone thinks about and the notion of thinking about it will just make everyone angry. Sorry!
Not the person you're asking, but I'm of the impression that colloquially, the verb "sex" includes more than strictly the traditional historical definition. I'll refrain from getting into specific details here, but I think the answer to this question is that many people use words in a manner that diverges from literal definitions.
There's a concept in linguistics that language is constantly evolving. As someone on the spectrum myself, with a tendency towards systemizing the world around me, I understand how frustrating this can feel.
That isn't strictly relegated to social concepts either, and I understand how frustrating it is. A particularly excruciating example is the transition of the intended meaning of "literally" to increasingly mean "figuratively".
At the end of the day, I try to deal with it by accepting that not everyone else experiences the world the way I do, and that it's as unfair for me to expect everyone else to modify the way they perceive, process, and utilize information (including language) to accommodate my idiosyncrasies.
Not minded at all - I thought that was an introspective and interesting comment; especially as someone who doesn’t really want kids, but also isn’t sure, but is also aging out of that period of his life.
The fertility rate is falling everywhere, even countries that have extensive childcare and maternity/paternity leave. Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
> Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work, plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.
The US and Canada seem more traditional in that a lot of people would really like to have kids and don't think it's pointless, but it's just impractical for economic reasons, and they're choosing to allocate what little resources they have towards a more comfortable life (relatively!) instead of having an economic struggle -- OR they do have kids but because they wait for economic certainty first, they start much later and as a result have way fewer per couple.
Of course, North America has a very loud segment that agrees with the European degrowth narrative detailed above, and Europe has a loud segment which goes against it.
The "generational guilt" theory does not check out to me at all. Coming from central Europe, I mostly hear about these rethorics from English-language sources. In non-english European media generational guilt for colonization is hardly a thing in my experience.
Your argument paints with a very wide brush, which is likely the source of the downvotes. That said, I do think you're touching upon a decent theory whether you realize it or not:
What if the real issue isn't merely environmental or economic in nature, but simply the species itself pulling back on births because we feel we have too many people already? Maybe there's enough ongoing crises throughout the world (that we're increasingly aware of thanks to global media) that, internally, our drive is to reduce the population naturally through attrition? It could be to conserve resources, or until the environment supports such rapid growth again, or something else entirely, but it's plausible that the human organism is self-evaluating its current population numbers and deciding that, just like Big Capital is doing via layoffs, we can do the same with less people.
shrug I don't have personal friends on a different continent, but I read what they write all the time on HN and say on YouTube. Feel free to illuminate us with your first-hand counterpoints instead of a contentless ad-hominem attack.
I mean, this is a quaint narrative, but it doesn't explain the fact that fertility is falling everywhere on earth, regardless of current economy, colonial past, continent, race, or religion.
It's falling in Western countries because we're commiting cultural suicide for the reasons I cited for Europe (the US is behind Europe, but seems to be on the same road). It's falling in countries like China because they moved like 70% of their population from farms to huge cities in the last 40 years, which causes their society to work much more like... the West. Places like Africa, etc. are falling as they get more access to birth control, work for women, etc.
I guess I should have said this: I theorize that the whole world is following a similar path, but different areas started sooner and are thus much farther along in their decadence. Africa is now where the US was in 1965. Europe today may be what the US looks like in 20 years.
Obviously though Western cultural beliefs are much easier to spread now than they were decades ago, so it could be that the developing world "catches up" much faster now. Maybe in 10 years, Africa will be more like US 2010 than US 1975.
> There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
Disagree on both. Pornography, like any media, has a multitude of styles and types that can evoke different sets of emotions from the viewer. It's an art form that speaks uniquely to each individual, and I've found it to be a healthy way to explore my own interests as well as to connect with potential partners on shared interests. It's also seen plenty of use by married couples as inspiration or "mental lubricant", promoting intercourse (and raising the chances of procreation) in the process. While it's true that not everybody uses it in such healthy ways, and it's also true that some smut is incredibly toxic (particularly to the uneducated/ill-informed), on the whole it's an inseparable part of the human experience we'd do well to utilize for the art and tool it is instead of repressing it out of some misguided notion of subjective purity.
I’ve noticed that, besides the magnetism and drive for sex (which would be sufficient for a species to propagate), many people also experience the biological imperative (wanting their genes replicated) as its own separate feeling.
This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.
So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.
Here is an uncomfortable truth: religious people produce more children, regardless of their income, social welfare status and living conditions. They are thought from birth that marriage, family and children are gifts from "God".
In fact, Christians make it a _requirement_ to be "open to life" (i.e have children) before they agree to marry you in Church (in addition to banning contraceptives, abortions and porn).
They also believe that pursuit of wealth, status and greed is a sin and one should focus his attention inward , towards "God", "Family", and "Charity".. disincentivizing people from dedicating their lives to their careers and missing their chances of having kids. is it no surprise then, that they ten to have larger families?
What I'm trying to highlight here, isn't a celebration of religious practices but the fact that we need a massive cultural shift, first and foremost to resolve this issue and if I'm being honest, I don't see this happening anytime soon.. at least not in our hyper capitalist society.
I'm not sure many people (especially women) are willing to sacrifice their lifestyles, career aspirations and goals to have children.
Unless people are taught from birth that having kids is their sole purpose in life and that family, motherhood and communities are deeply celebrated by society, they will opt out of having kids.
The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.
The main researchers associated here are Samir KC and Wolfgan Lutz. Their latest update (with a long list of coauthors) is from 2024 [1]; this is a followup of the important 2013 paper [2].
I don’t have any structured references saved, sorry.
My understanding is that the only real correlation is years in education, but this is at the national level; the very rich and very poor (which imperfectly correlates with level of education attained) tend to have more children than the middle class, but fertility rates are down across every income level. What this means is that if you look at two countries and see that one has a higher level of education than the other, you would expect the country with the higher level of education to have a lower fertility rate, but within both countries you would expect to see a relatively uniform decline in fertility across every income level, with a more pronounced decline around middle income levels.
This is maybe what’s being referenced when people saying they’ll have kids when capitalism gets sorted, but this isn’t seen in countries where standards of living have improved considerably.
The simplest theory is that more people are using contraceptives because they simply don’t want children. Some people might subjectively feel like they can’t afford to have children, but by world historical (and contemporary) standards of living this argument looks incredibly silly.
This totally ignores the fact that the decline in fertility is measurable across the globe in the poorest and wealthiest nations in the world. It's clearly not a simple matter of affordability...
The rates are plummeting everywhere. Even countries that have 3 or 4 kids per woman used to have 5 or 6 and are on pace to drop below replacement within 15-20 years.
> Previously in this space, under the heading “Africa Rising?” yours truly cited The Lancet’s latest population stats on sub-Saharan Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s only region with an above-replacement total fertility rate (TFR), currently estimated from 4.3 to 4.6. They’ve gone from 8 percent of global births in 1950 to 30 percent in 2021, headed to 54 percent by century’s end. While the region’s TFR is falling fast, any sub-Saharan population contraction is at least a century out. However, according to Macrotrends, Africa’s TFR (4.1) has declined an average of 1.3 percent annually over the last three years. Should this trend persist, Africa will eventually plunge into below-replacement territory. Demographers believe fertility decline is accelerating faster than projected, especially in sub-Sahara Africa. Statista, the European aggregator of figures, projects Africa’s 2030 TFR at 3.8.
yes those are true but the fact remains that despite the falling rate, sub-saharan TFR is 4.5, while brazil is 1.6, iran 1.7 etc. The correlation of TFR with wealth is a fact
The correlation between wealth and fertility is quickly breaking down, both between countries and within (rich people have more kids, poor people have fewer).
Rent is the bigger issue than affordability per se. My wife pointed out the other day that we had our second and third kids shortly after we stopped living in apartments and bought a house. We didn't plan to have a significant age gap between our first (who we had in law school) and our other kids, and we earned a lot of money the whole time, it just happened that way. She's convinced that having the extra space subconsciously encouraged us to have more kids.
I've been encouraging my cousin who desperately wants children to have them in her two bedroom apartment but she feels that she needs to have a house first and she and her husband can't afford one. They're in their late 30s. My partner and I are mid-30s planning to have young children in our 2 bedroom apartment, we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO NOT EXIST in our Los Angeles neighborhood. More space means untenable commutes which brings more complicated childcare logistics (can't get to daycare before it closes, less time with kids etc).
This seems to be an absolute epidemic across the state. Same with condos. It's like they assume that apartments of any kind are only for single people and maybe a couple with one child. In other words, people who are dragging the fertility rate down toward 50%.
When I pull up Zillow and look at rentals across a huge swath of the East Bay, there are 8,309 apartments listed (I filtered out houses and townhomes). I add one filter: 3+ bedrooms. The number drops to 784. Fewer than 10% (!) of apartments listed have 3+ bedrooms. (Also, a quick spot check of these seems to show a nontrivial amount that are actually just houses with faulty metadata.)
This puts a tremendous burden on low-income people, to have to foot the higher cost of maintaining a home and/or of an absurd commute, just in order to have enough space[1] to have more than one kid. That, or overpay to compete for one of the few bigger apartments, many of which are "luxury" oriented.
Meanwhile, the high-income can afford a house or a luxury 3br apartment, but they are mostly high-income because they've deprioritized family, putting in 10+ years of being DINKs. In my circle of upper middle class tech types, many of them are 35-38 before having their first kid. 1 kid is much more likely than 3 for people starting in their late 30s, so this drags down fertility rates even among the "high income" subgroup!
[1] I know opinions vary on whether it's good and healthy to have kids sharing rooms, though imho I don't want a son and daughter forced to bunk together as they get older, and calls to 'just share rooms' is giving "Own nothing and be happy."
For what it's worth, we had our first child when we lived in a studio in our late 20s. One kid is really easy space-wise. The only reason we even got a 2BR before buying our house is that we got an au pair.
This did not stop people in the past. You read of three-room New York tenements holding families of ten, or families with half a dozen children living in a single-room frontier cabin, and this was considered commonplace.
My parents raised eleven children in a typical four-bedroom suburban tract house.
Because we have an expectation for more space. Pretty simple, no one wants to go backwards to when we lived in single room tenements with a wife pumping out babies for a decade in a row. Also, no one can afford a four bedroom home with twelve occupants on a single income like in the 50s.
Any data for this? I think this maybe the real answer because unlike other explanations, this one can actually acquire proof from before modern ages. Simply because it's known that cities fertility rates were always negative and have to constantly pull people from countryside.
This is probably a factor, but I think it’s a mistake to treat cities not being suited for raising children as a hard, immutable fact. They’re bad because rent continues to soar which clashes on two fronts (kids are expensive already and increase space requirements) and we as a society have decided to build our urban spaces (suburbs included) to be explicitly not friendly to children, families, or anybody not driving and to instead favor adults with money to spend. These are things we could change, should we want to.
The other thing to look at is why people have migrated into cities, and the answer is pretty simple: it’s where the good employment prospects are. The further yet get away from urban cores the worse those get: fewer jobs, worse compensation and benefits, greater risk of being stuck between jobs for long periods of time. Anybody worried about birthrates should be embracing remote work and making sure they compensate their employees well.
It's not just rent, it's also transportation. Transporting young kids with a car is easy, public transportation is much harder until they are 10 or so.
For example try transporting a sleepy kid, or more than 1 young kid at the same time.
Cities are cars don't get along very well, which makes them less friendly to kids.
Suburbs are really nice for kids, basically zero car traffic, you can play in the street, easily go to parks. And when the parents need to take you far you have a car available.
Transportation can be a challenge, but I don’t agree that a car is a requirement. When I’m in Japan it’s common to see parents carting around a kid or two on an appropriately kitted out bike for example. That wouldn’t be as practical in a sprawling suburb, but it can work in denser cities.
> Suburbs are really nice for kids, basically zero car traffic, you can play in the street, easily go to parks. And when the parents need to take you far you have a car available.
This varies a lot depending on the suburb. There are many that are endless house-deserts where you’re not doing anything without a ride. The one where I live is much more broken up, but sidewalk coverage is patchy at best.
While I generally agree with this and am angry at "the elites" who seem to both want increased fertility but also don't really target it in their companies ... I think the bigger unspoken issue is really the TFR skew. Global fertility can go down for a while and it isn't disastrous. TFR skew results in large problems if the least progressive and poorest groups systematically have much higher TFR over extended periods.
None of the solutions I can think of are very appealing or even tolerable. It really feels like it's a matter of carrying on and having hope. But perhaps we could start by merely describing the data and the situation.
The thing that collapses in a negative population growth environment is passive earnings from interest and asset appreciation, retirement, and to some extent social welfare states. The whole idea of things like social security is predicated on a growing population paying for the elderly. It's also very, very bearish for things like real estate long term. We are probably still in a real estate bubble.
I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall about this since I was in my twenties.
I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like climate change and natural resource depletion.
Social security is solvent for at least the next 75 years if the US removes the payroll cap on contributions from wage income. We choose not to. The economic resources exist for these social programs, it will just diminish profits (the horror /s). It's a policy choice.
Every year total fertility rate remains lower than replacement rate further locks in the fertility curve, but there is no political will or desire to implement the fixes required. So, we keep kicking the can until we cannot anymore. It's unfortunate. Demographic destiny comes regardless, as each year total fertility rate continues to fall.
By 2075, Medicare and Social Security will reach a over 14% of GDP combined, up from around 8% today. To pay that, we'll have to raise taxes by $1.75 trillion using today's GDP figures. That will require just about doubling payroll taxes from the present level.
That's probably an underestimate. As population shrinks, GDP will shrink as well, unless we have large gains in productivity, which have stalled. It's not clear to me that the projections about SS/Medicare as a percentage of GDP account for the effect of GDP shrinking due to population decline. CBO assumes a stable population through 2060, using quite arbitrary assumptions about immigration: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875.
I agree with your observations. The future will not be as bright as the past, the population boom was already squeezed for the gains. Immigration at the levels needed to change this are unpalatable to most electorates, and with total fertility rate dropping across the world, it's important to be mindful that net migration to Earth is 0 (slide 39). As the economic future deteriorates due to the ever increasing drag of these obligations, I'd expect total fertility rate to continue to decline at present rates (if not slightly accelerate). This creates a self reinforcing feedback loop. A "Demographic Doom Loop" [1].
All that said, I agree with your general point that the situation with the welfare state is probably fixable, if we don’t enter a doom loop. It’s just more burdensome than lifting the SS cap.
I’m more optimistic about non-western countries. I suspect descendants of Puritans will be a historical curiosity in 2500 but I think Muslims and Mormons will still exist.
The welfare state has to collapse before people realize children are their retirement plan, and that there’s no guarantee the government will take care of them in old age.
There is no guarantee your children will take care of you. Walk through any nursing or care home and speak with residents, ask the last time a child saw them.
doubtful 75% is all high quality. The one quarter is probably all really bad, then some of that 75% is bad enough that it won't make much difference. Probably 25% is so into their parents that they will actually take care of them.
The tide is rising and most ships are sinking. Productivity in the last 40 years has skyrocketed. The gains have overwhelmingly gone to a tiny minority while everyone else has seen rent, food, education, and more go up dramatically faster than wages. This has accelerated in the last 15 years and has destroyed any faith in the social contract.
Inflation isn't the problem. Corporate consolidation, collusion, price fixing, and market capture are the problems.
In nearly every field where there used to be 10-20 competitors there are 2-4 and they're not doing much "competing" any more. They're using consultants and third parties to share data and fix prices, they're buying up the entire supply and dividing areas so they have monopolies.
Note how during the COVID "inflation" corporate profits soared faster than inflation.
The pie isn't always growing and the pie isn't always static. There are times where either can happen. I think people are just feeling that we are entering a period where the pie will be stagnant for a while. In the short term the world might be a zero sum game.
Is there an upper bound to the creation of wealth? Is it infinite? Are there any limits to its creation? Is there any inherent value to it without being able to "transfer"?
If I cut down trees to build a house, then I may have created "wealth" but I've also destroyed trees. Now the net affect may be that wealth has increased, but it may also have an effect which actually destroys wealth like for instance if those trees existed on a hill, and the roots were holding the soil in place, the act of cutting down
"Free market" economics does not capture this destruction of value. It only cares that some value was extracted out of the trees in the form of a new home sale, etc.
I'm sure all those slaves brought over to the New World created tremendous wealth, but I'm also pretty sure they would have rather preferred to stay in Africa.
> "Free market" economics does not capture this destruction of value.
Oh, but it does. It turns out that people who own land take care of it, so that it keeps producing. People who own timber land tend to manage it so it continues to be productive.
Destruction happens with government owned land.
For a related example, why are we not running out of cattle, hogs, and chickens, despite slaughtering them on an epic scale? And why are we running out of fish?
Come on. Sometimes wealth gets created. Sometimes wealth just gets moved around. That is a fact.
Musk's wealth is mostly notional. Most of it is based on people's guesses about the future of electric cars and so forth. It's not clear yet whether that is creation or transfer or what.
Maybe a startup can have a high valuation for a while and ultimately be worth nothing. Maybe that has happened.
Maybe Musk will turn out to have created 10x more wealth than he has now. Maybe he will screw up and go broke.
Maybe both.
Where did Bernie Madoff's wealth come from before he got caught? Where did Sam Bankman-Fried's wealth come from? We can't just point to a unit of wealth and automatically applaud its legal owner as having created it. Maybe they created it. Maybe they stole it. Maybe we all wigged out and handed it to them voluntarily. It's case by case.
We all read Ayn Rand back in the day. And I can groove with that at a certain dosage, but you're taking way too much.
Excluding fraud, theft, and so forth, just by definition, means we're talking about a utopia. It's not a system, it's some beautiful subset of what's really going on. The subset would have to be carefully selected, using information we don't actually have until (maybe) much later. Maybe never.
This 'free market' is a bit like clean matter-antimatter power stations. They sound like a great idea. We could build them if we knew how.
I never claimed free markets were utopian. The purpose of government in a free market economy is to provide justice for acts of force or fraud, and provide enforcement of contracts.
There is no such thing as a perfect free market. However, history shows that the closer we are to them, the more prosperous the country is.
BTW, when the Soviet Union was formed, the communists did away with the police because there would no longer be a need for them. Oops.
Some wealth is created. People build new things and sell them. Video Games or Programming Languages for example.
Some wealth is just transferred, like rent or interest.
It would be nice if everybody had somewhere to live for free, unfortunately, most people have to pay rent or interest on a mortgage to those that came before them.
An artist creates wealth by painting a beautiful painting. Then he exchanges that wealth for money.
At no point was wealth "transferred" to the artist.
McDonald's creates wealth by designing and building a system to deliver hamburgers. McDonald's then exchanges that wealth for cash from its customers.
BTW, who gives money to people who already have it? Not me. I doubt you do, either. I don't know anybody who does. The transactions are always exchanges - you are getting something in return.
No body (?) is contending that in a free market wealth is not created.
The contention is that when wealth is created it tends to head to other wealth.
When a bank lends capital and has a choice of lending to, say, Elon Musk or me, I think the bank will make that rational choice and lend to Elon. Thus once you have some wealth attracting more wealth is less difficult than from before you had wealth
Lending money is not transferring wealth, nor is it creating wealth. It nets out to zero.
This is clear when one does accounting. Accounting is based on the idea that (Equity = Assets - Liabilities). When one takes out a loan, the assets go up by the amount of the loan, and the liabilities also go up by the amount of the loan. The Equity stays the same. That this balances out is literally called "balancing the books".
BTW, banks are happy to lend out money to people that have a track record of paying it back. This includes poor people. Poor people have credit cards, too, which is how they borrow money.
A Ferrari costs far, far more to maintain than a Ford, and doesn't last as long. I drove my used Ford Bronco II for 32 years before giving it to a scrap yard. Best bang for the buck car ever.
Expensive shirts wear out just as fast as cheap shirts. They just look nicer (and are often less comfortable).
P.S. I still regularly wear the combat boots my dad bought me 50 years ago. The boot black on them has long since disappeared, but they still keep my feet dry and warm.
Nice assertions, but where’s the content of your post? What’s your opinion here based on those two things? Those are just two statements, but do you believe things are different now than historically or are you arguing it’s the same as it ever was, or something else?
I’m probably not old enough yet to share my opinion on societal change across generations, I was a kid until recently.
Maybe expecting every single person to work and no one to homestead and care for the kids, within a system that explicitly does not support families, was a mistake. (Please note that I did not gender the roles. My best friend is a stay-at-home dad and he is amazing. They can afford to do this, though, because his wife's compensation is extremely high.)
Expectations are part of it, but regardless of compensation or lack thereof it turns out that a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children. Child rearing is essential, and rewarding in many ways. But it's also exhausting, repetitive, and frustrating. It's not surprising that given the choice many adults would rather spend time around other adults instead of children. In the past most societies kind of "solved" this inherent problem by artificially restricting women's but obviously that's not acceptable or even feasible now.
The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.
The mid-century Baby Boom came after WWII, and probably had very little to do with technology. The upswing started some time in late 1944 to mid 1945 as combat was winding down in Europe and a lot of young men were returning home. Otherwise fertility has been declining steadily since 1800 in western countries.
I don’t agree with Thompson, his start date is the place where fertility hit a local minimum, not the year where the rate really took off which was 1946. A lot of the technological innovations actually predated his arguable start date by 5-10 years and several happened well into the boom.
I think his explanation fits the thesis of his recent book, which I actually like, but it seem a bit off here.
No, this is exactly the opposite of true: you need to do more reading about the baby boom. It happened across many countries, including ones which had little involvement in WWII, and in almost all cases it began in the 1930s, even with the Great Depression underway. It got supercharged by the end of the war because that's when the economic doldrums finally ended, but upward trend in fertility predated even the beginning of the war, never mind the end.
The technological explanation wouldn’t really account for any increase in places where 1930s and 40s technology hadn’t been deployed. I’d need a little more than hand waving to evaluate or engage with your argument.
Late child birth is not about fertility but about risks for the child. The only woman I know (yeah, anecdotes) who attempted to delay getting a child until after her 40th birthday got a baby with down syndrome. I know what living with a disability in our world means, from personal experience. And given that experience, I have a hard time giving these women some slack. I think they are risking the well being of their children just for their own selfish reasons. We are humans, and there are limits to what we can do. We need to accept them, or we will make other people suffer.
My concern is the intersection of rightwing natalism with Silicon Valley ideology leading to technological “solutions” involving, essentially, test tube babies. Take women out of the picture entirely. I can especially see a dystopian dynamic involving the “we have to compete with China” or “they’re doing it / about to do it in China” narratives.
That’s a colloquial term for IVF pregnancies but that’s not what I mean. I mean artificial wombs, and all the other technologies downstream from a push to “scale up” procreation: like robots that can raise children.
The selection effects of this transition will be really fascinating to see after the fact. The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids", but is being subjected for the first time to "having more kids while extreme prosperity and modern telecommunications exist" which is a very different thing.
> The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids"
This needs to be carefully qualified. Infant mortality rates for the first 99% of human history were so shockingly, stupefyingly high, that a woman might only expect to have about three of her children survive to adulthood (and maternal mortality rates were also so high that a woman wouldn't expect to survive more childbirths than 5 or 6).
What this means is that the human population was only marginally above replacement for the majority of human history. Human population didn't explode until the medicinal revolution.
I had an evolutionary bio professor in college say this: "you don't understand evolution until you understand how contraception could lead to overpopulation."
Anything placed in the path of reproduction is a barrier to be overcome.
If there is anything in the human genome that correlates with a positive desire to choose to have children, we are selecting hard for that right now. We may see a bottleneck this century and then a gigantic population explosion next century as a result, with a world full of people with very loud "biological clocks" who just adore and crave babies.
That is assuming this is genetically determined enough to be a target for selection. There are probably correlates that are, and I could speculate endlessly about what they are, but I also know that such speculations are likely to be wrong because these systems are complex and often counter-intuitive.
One I've speculated about recently is negativity bias. It seems to me that a lot of people choosing not to have kids right now are doing so because of negativity bias, because they see the world as a terrible place as a result of their consumption of negative media. Historically negativity bias may be something that's been selected for, but this may now have flipped. Optimists may have higher fitness now while pessimists did pre-industrialization and pre-modernity. But again, speculation.
What do you / your prof think about the timelines though? I always heard people shoot these kinds of arguments down by saying that evolution does not significantly operate on our accelerated timelines of human technology.
How long an evolutionary change takes can vary widely depending on a ton of factors: current makeup of the gene pool, strength of selection, whether it's a single or multiple gene trait, whether and to what extent there are counter-pressures selecting in the other way, and so on. It's very hard to say.
The future is probably a society with more robots than humans.
We can see this happening now at Amazon.
Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis.
Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots.
Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.
How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway.
The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B).
Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.
The simple Kiva mobile platforms are most of the robot count, but they replaced large numbers of people who did walk around warehouses moving stuff from A to B.
I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong.
The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M.
You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.)
Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging.
Then there are obvious economic measures, etc.
The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.
Zoom in on Kinshasa though and you can see that it's almost entirely very densely-packed slums and shantytowns built up against each other, about 100 - 250 square meters in size, with no gardens or back yards. Slums can be very dense, Dharavi in Mumbai 2.3 square KM with a population of about a million. Manhattan has a much lower population density now than 100 years ago.
Also in all the street view pictures it looks absolutely packed - every road is gridlocked with people everywhere, but Shanghai has a lot of empty space for people despite its size. Roads have trees, they're much wider, there are a lot of open parks, office buildings etc that Kinshasa wouldn't have.
I just did what you suggested and looked at Kinshasa and it looks HUGE to me. Endless rows of streets. Reminded me of Mexico City (and I just compared satellite imagery and they seem similar in that respect - and they are similar in terms of population). Big cities with few skyscrapers and tons of low rise buildings are quite common. In the west, Paris is an example of a populous city without many tall buildings.
Kinshasa's urban area (not the entire province) is generously estimated at 600 square km.
Mexico City is 1485 square km.
Mexico City's population, within that 1485 km^2 envelope, is most commonly given as ~9.5M. (It's ~20M with satellite towns and regions.)
And then consider that most of Kinshasa is comprised of buildings that are very low to the ground -- far lower than in Paris -- whereas Mexico City is in places very dense.
I drove right around Africa through 35 countries over three years. I drove across both Nigeria and the DRC.
There are dozens and dozens of massive cities that take hours to cross in Nigeria you’ve never heard of. Anecdotally, it’s way, way, way more populous than anything nearby. Ethiopia felt somewhat similar in parts, as did Egypt.
Can you name a few of them in Nigeria? On satellite imaging, from what I've seen, they're not so massive, and they're mostly comprised of a sprawl of 1-3 story buildings.
We can compare vs. cities that we have good numbers for. Or Chinese/Indian cities, for that matter. (After looking at Nigeria or the DRC, a quick glance at India via satellite imaging is shocking.)
That said, Egypt is very populous, there's no doubt about that one.
I drove through at least 10 cities in Nigeria I’ve never heard of that had tons of buildings over 10 stories. I just took the fastest route across, I didn’t go wandering. This was 10 years ago too.
Also remember the DRC is almost a million square miles. So it’s 1.5x Alaska.
Thank you for this. Nigerian here, and I have to say that you hit the nail squarely on the head. Population counts in Nigeria are deeply political and essentially every region/state is motivated to fake/overestimate their headcount to get a bigger chunk of the oil revenue, which is pretty much the most significant slice of gov. revenue.
But, once you dig into the figures, you realize it'd be a miracle if Nigeria has up to half of the population it claims.
Every single census that's been conducted has been marred by controversy, with states trying to buff up their populations to make their ethnicity/region look bigger and more important.
But, proxies like registered BVN (like Social Security Number, but for bank accounts) are just under 70M. Registered phone lines (~240M; each person usually owns 3-5) are similarly lackluster. Domestic demand is nothing to write home about if you run a CPG business. Zoom into a satellite view of a city that's supposed to have ~700k to 1M people and it looks like a suburb - just scanty.
Nigeria's most populous city claims to have 20M people - 2* the population of Seoul, one of the most urbanized, dense, vertical cities in the world, meanwhile, Lagos is just a sprawling slum.
Personally, I feel population counts across Africa are grossly overestimated. A good estimate would be 600-800M, but where's the fun in that when we can fearmonger about overpopulation?
You estimate a factor of two for over estimate, believable, but higher than I would have thought. Makes sense with the context of getting more revenue. Thank you
I caution you against the "I looked at satellite image" nonsense. Your lived experience is very valuable. Looking at a satellite image is not
Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly living off their state pension.
As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree, too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7 more years to reproduce.
I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.
Hopefully the deflation scenario due to technology will help with this shift gracefully. Else, it will be extremely difficult.
But if we had deflation in the economy, how will the investment scenario will Peter out is anyone’s guess.
I wonder The people who invented this financial growth will, why they didn’t thought about this in the long term? I guess, I have asked a question which has quite a generic answer already…
A substantial realignment in the economy is what's coming. The charge will be when the rate of vacated homes starts to uptick as their aren't enough capable people to live in them: right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand, but those retirement figures imply a different reality as time goes on: eventually those people start going into care facilities, but their won't be nearly enough people around to supply the demand for the properties they're finally moving out from.
The real markets are absolutely not ready for that reality.
> right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand
The major metros have the least to worry about from this. Those cities have high housing costs because of demand, or to put it another way, those cities have high demand despite high housing costs, and the economic factors that cause people to be attracted to cities aren't going to go away; density is devastatingly efficient and it's cheaper and more convenient for people to be close to things. But what this means is that as the population falls, that latent demand causes the less dense, lower-priced areas to depopulate. See Japan's crisis of rural depopulation, and how Tokyo isn't the one feeling the pinch.
Little mention of automation in the labor discussion. Also, no real discussion of the consumerism aspect of the economy when talking about worker productivity.
Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.
and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”
The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand:
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
Progressive taxation will generally mean that anyone under the median income has a negative net impact on the government's finances. All this study is doing is reflecting the obvious fact that immigrants are by and large working class.
Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population. That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
> Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population
Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.
> That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
If the surplus economic value created by immigrants who are employed is generally not returned to them in the form of high wages, then yeah, they're not going to be paying it to the government as taxes.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that a lot of people in this thread seem to be conflating per-person net economic benefit and net tax payments. The first can be significantly positive while the second is negative.
> Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.
If you have cheap labor who draw more in public services than they pay in taxes, then you're using tax dollars to effectively subsidize private profits. Maybe that's the unstated rationale, but few proponents of immigration would say that out loud.
Why are the demographics of a small Nordic nation something "everyone" should understand? Whenever I've pointed to how well the social safety nets work in these countries and how they could be an example for the US, I've been told that the US is too different of a country to draw an analogy.
Denmark has been the most systematic about collecting this sort of data about immigrants from different places. I suspect you’d see similar results in the UK and Canada if those governments collected the data. Canada’s GDP per capita has actually started declining recently.
I think Denmark’s welfare system is a model, so whoever you’re arguing with, it’s not me. I will point out that, if Denmark with its robust welfare system can’t integrate MENAPT immigrants effectively, that doesn’t bode well for other countries with less efficient welfare states.
Net cost to a national government and GDP per capita are not the same thing. Presumably these people become more productive by moving to more developed countries; that's the general reason that people immigrate to particular places. My impression without looking at the data is that US GDP per capita has continued to increase despite large (called a crisis by Republicans) numbers of immigrants during the Biden Administration. And given that these people are not citizens of the US, presumably they will not be eligible for all benefits granted to citizens which would decrease their cost to the government.
In contrast to Sweden, which decided to simply stop collecting data on certain things whenever a given statistic began to become inconvenient with respect to asylum and immigration policies.
Over what timespan? This analysis isn't elaborated at all. Does it count the impact of companies being able to pay lower wages and paying more taxes? Does it account for the future generations? Etc.
Intuitvely, those opposing immigration have always known this. But tell that t someone from the left They will verbally kill you for stating obvious facts.
No, because freedom of movement and commerce (specifically, selling one's labor) are human rights. No right is absolute, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
There is no “human right” to cross national borders. It’s the opposite. International law recognizes both the collective right of “peoples”—groups of people—to form nations, and the right of nations to their territorial integrity.
The left vs right theatre is really just two sides of the same coin.
By now every western democracy is being dragged along the same path with different stages of progression.
1. Move domestic production and jobs to lesser developed countries to increase profits.
2. Open the gates for mass immigration under the guise of openness and empathy to import wage slaves for the service sector and use every media channel to ostracize anyone who utters the slightest doubt about this policy.
3. Aggressively push DEI and gender ideology to alienate the social-democratic left from the academic left and drown out any other popular left topics like worker's rights or class warfare.
4. Amplify polarization on social media by creating as many conflicts as possible (left vs right, old vs young, men vs women, natives vs immigrants, ...).
5. Promote a right-wing populist party and trick enough people into voting for it.
6. Move the tax burden from the rich to the middle and lower class and remove regulations and restrictions on companies while ignoring all the other problems.
7. Establish surveillance and authoritarian rule under the guise of safety.
Everyone in this so-called culture war is being played, so maybe it's time to stop being smug about being smarter than the other side and start contemplating if there is any common idea that we can agree on that allows us to go forward.
You realize different kinds of immigrants go to different places? Do you think that immigrants from Bangladesh are a net cost at every country they go to including Pakistan?
Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve completely to death with no aid). He believed that the sustainable population for the planet was one billion.
He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."
India got there on overpopulation. Total fertility rate around 6 in 1965. India does not have enough water for its population.[1] China would have hit similar problems if not for their one-child policy. China managed to avoid the overshoot when medicine starts to work but the economy hasn't developed yet. India didn't.
Unfortunately a lot of people are now saying we need extreme curtailing of rights -- largely womens' rights -- because of underpopulation. The answer to every panic is always curtailing of rights. Scary thing may happen therefore we need big alpha ape to fix it for us by bashing people on head with big rock. Grunt, grunt.
Right this is what I am saying. And I think that we should be outrageously skeptical of such people and oppose them with fervor. In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe. These people were wrong in every possible dimension and has we listened to them we would have committed a world-historic evil.
Similarly, we are starting to see people say that we need to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world (this time based on gender) in order to prevent future catastrophe. I suspect that these people will be wrong in every possible dimension and that if we listen to them that we will be committing a world-historic evil.
> In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe.
Erlich (and others) said that we needed to do the following
* programs of mass sterilization in the third world
* a "triage" program where we partition the third world into "savable" and "unsavable" zones, block all movement between these zones, and expel the unsavable zones from our world order such that they will simply all starve to death.
I kinda think this answers the question as to why these ideas get a pass: they offer a way to be racist and advocate racist eugenics policies without admitting you are racist, even to yourself.
I see racism in the population collapse panic too unfortunately, at least in the popular discourse around it. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.
That depends very much on how technology progresses during coming decades. If we get something like AGI, then having less working age people may be a good thing, because there will be much, much less demand for white collar workers at least.
In the mid 2000's when I was a kid, at school I was taught that there would be a HUGE labour shortage once certain large generations retire, as younger generations are much smaller. Guess what, they retired a decade ago, and yet my country has the second highest unemployment rate in EU, with a very weak job market for fresh graduates in particular. Increased efficiency & automation ate all those jobs, nobody was hired to replace many of the boomers who retired. I doubt the future will be any different.
Social welfare state will still exist, it'll just be more costly as drag than it is today (in the US, ~$1.1T/year of uncompensated caregiving occurs, for example). Capitalism is more the challenge, it's built on squeezing the aggregate working age population for profits, and that cohort is in terminal decline over the long term. Between global sovereign debt load [1] and the demand for future profits (slides 31-33 of this PDF), there will be sadness as the future has less and less humans to saddle these economic burdens on. Such are the breaks when you predicate a socioeconomic system on never ending growth, and growth is over because humans globally (for various complex and interwoven issues) are choosing to have less children or no children.
A tfr of 1.7, the welfare state will be costly but exist. A tfr of .73 like korea has? Long term, that’s 1 20 year old and 3 45 year olds taking care of half a baby, 7 70 year olds and 10 95 year olds
Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down.
> Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but...
> our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output.
Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated.
> We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this.
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system.
> Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder.
Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth?
> Affordable housing:
Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.
I feel like slide 39 would have gotten you chased out of polite society 10 years ago.
A lot of western countries economies are built on sustained mass migration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Arguably the United States where both parties champion it (turn the other check to illegal migraiton of the democrats VS mass H1B visas of the republicans).
This is all well and good, but population dropping will only impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact.
Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping.
The much larger worry should be Climate Change, a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the population falling.
Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling resources.
EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big fear, the rich may have to start paying more.
It will likely bring back the problem of old age destitution as rule, not exception. It's a previously common scourge that never went completely away[1][2], but went into the sidelines by early-mid XX century, and is set to coming back with a vengeance, by the time current people in their 20s-30s reach old age. It hits the poor hard.
The history of the world and economics is far more nuanced than rich people hoarding wealth. Wealth is the economy, it's created from systems. The feudal system in the medieval age was relatively poor at generating wealth. A series of technological and intellectual developments began to rapidly increase in the 1400s that culminated in the modern era, including especially the printing press.
But in the 1300s serfdom was still the norm in Europe. Serfs did not get paid and so the Plague made no difference except 2/3 of the population died. Serfdom would last another several hundred years after the plague, and in some countries all the way to the 20th century.
I think it's gonna be fine. The capital per person (capital deepening) will be great. Things that prove hard to automate will suffer — maybe elder care can't be automated and will go to shit — but a lot of stuff can be automated.
Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de...
Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.
And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate.
But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society.
Just some rambling, don't mind me.
For what it's worth, I'm also a single gay man and think similarly at times about the path not taken, and why I chose not to adopt as I had originally planned in my 20s. It sucks, but I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed. Society needs more than just parents in order for children to thrive, and I believe queer folk are ideally suited to fill in a lot of those roles.
As for my comments on sex specifically, I'll admit I'm speaking through the perspective of someone who A) doesn't have it in order to procreate, and B) has a healthier relationship with it than many of my own peers might. It's not solely an act of procreation or hedonism, but it can fill both roles - though I will only ever know it from the perspective of pleasure alone.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts like that. Thank you.
Disclaimer: my thought process tends to be somewhat autistic, I don’t mean any offense. As a non gay man I am just curious to hear your perspective.
From a strictly biological perspective, I think it could be argued that gay “sex” isn’t actually sex. Like, what makes it sex? Is it sex for pleasure? Or is it something adjacent to sex? That has some commonalities with sex, but isn’t actually sex. Like there is a part of sex missing from the equation. Why do we still call it sex?
I kind of assume it’s the kind of thing hardly anyone thinks about and the notion of thinking about it will just make everyone angry. Sorry!
Not the person you're asking, but I'm of the impression that colloquially, the verb "sex" includes more than strictly the traditional historical definition. I'll refrain from getting into specific details here, but I think the answer to this question is that many people use words in a manner that diverges from literal definitions.
There's a concept in linguistics that language is constantly evolving. As someone on the spectrum myself, with a tendency towards systemizing the world around me, I understand how frustrating this can feel.
That isn't strictly relegated to social concepts either, and I understand how frustrating it is. A particularly excruciating example is the transition of the intended meaning of "literally" to increasingly mean "figuratively".
At the end of the day, I try to deal with it by accepting that not everyone else experiences the world the way I do, and that it's as unfair for me to expect everyone else to modify the way they perceive, process, and utilize information (including language) to accommodate my idiosyncrasies.
Not minded at all - I thought that was an introspective and interesting comment; especially as someone who doesn’t really want kids, but also isn’t sure, but is also aging out of that period of his life.
The fertility rate is falling everywhere, even countries that have extensive childcare and maternity/paternity leave. Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
> Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work, plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.
The US and Canada seem more traditional in that a lot of people would really like to have kids and don't think it's pointless, but it's just impractical for economic reasons, and they're choosing to allocate what little resources they have towards a more comfortable life (relatively!) instead of having an economic struggle -- OR they do have kids but because they wait for economic certainty first, they start much later and as a result have way fewer per couple.
Of course, North America has a very loud segment that agrees with the European degrowth narrative detailed above, and Europe has a loud segment which goes against it.
The "generational guilt" theory does not check out to me at all. Coming from central Europe, I mostly hear about these rethorics from English-language sources. In non-english European media generational guilt for colonization is hardly a thing in my experience.
Why is fertility so low in Iran then? Or very Catholic Poland? It does not seem to correlate strongly with religion or belief systems.
The strongest correlation I see is urbanization. People in cities don’t have kids as much.
Educated women tend to have fewer children.
(Also fewer child deaths)
Your argument paints with a very wide brush, which is likely the source of the downvotes. That said, I do think you're touching upon a decent theory whether you realize it or not:
What if the real issue isn't merely environmental or economic in nature, but simply the species itself pulling back on births because we feel we have too many people already? Maybe there's enough ongoing crises throughout the world (that we're increasingly aware of thanks to global media) that, internally, our drive is to reduce the population naturally through attrition? It could be to conserve resources, or until the environment supports such rapid growth again, or something else entirely, but it's plausible that the human organism is self-evaluating its current population numbers and deciding that, just like Big Capital is doing via layoffs, we can do the same with less people.
Just something to chew on.
Sounds like anthropomorphism of species/evolution.
I'm guessing you literally don't know anyone in Europe.
shrug I don't have personal friends on a different continent, but I read what they write all the time on HN and say on YouTube. Feel free to illuminate us with your first-hand counterpoints instead of a contentless ad-hominem attack.
I mean, this is a quaint narrative, but it doesn't explain the fact that fertility is falling everywhere on earth, regardless of current economy, colonial past, continent, race, or religion.
Put another way:
It's falling in Western countries because we're commiting cultural suicide for the reasons I cited for Europe (the US is behind Europe, but seems to be on the same road). It's falling in countries like China because they moved like 70% of their population from farms to huge cities in the last 40 years, which causes their society to work much more like... the West. Places like Africa, etc. are falling as they get more access to birth control, work for women, etc.
I guess I should have said this: I theorize that the whole world is following a similar path, but different areas started sooner and are thus much farther along in their decadence. Africa is now where the US was in 1965. Europe today may be what the US looks like in 20 years.
Obviously though Western cultural beliefs are much easier to spread now than they were decades ago, so it could be that the developing world "catches up" much faster now. Maybe in 10 years, Africa will be more like US 2010 than US 1975.
> There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
Disagree on both. Pornography, like any media, has a multitude of styles and types that can evoke different sets of emotions from the viewer. It's an art form that speaks uniquely to each individual, and I've found it to be a healthy way to explore my own interests as well as to connect with potential partners on shared interests. It's also seen plenty of use by married couples as inspiration or "mental lubricant", promoting intercourse (and raising the chances of procreation) in the process. While it's true that not everybody uses it in such healthy ways, and it's also true that some smut is incredibly toxic (particularly to the uneducated/ill-informed), on the whole it's an inseparable part of the human experience we'd do well to utilize for the art and tool it is instead of repressing it out of some misguided notion of subjective purity.
[dead]
Humans all across the developed world work 40% fewer hours than in 1900: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever. Yet, in the U.S., TFR has consistently been dropping since 1800: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever.
I think your thinking also aligns with the ideas outlined in [The Future is Degrowth](https://www.versobooks.com/products/2620-the-future-is-degro...). I found it to be a very approachable book, if you haven't read it yet.
I’ve noticed that, besides the magnetism and drive for sex (which would be sufficient for a species to propagate), many people also experience the biological imperative (wanting their genes replicated) as its own separate feeling.
This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.
So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.
Here is an uncomfortable truth: religious people produce more children, regardless of their income, social welfare status and living conditions. They are thought from birth that marriage, family and children are gifts from "God".
In fact, Christians make it a _requirement_ to be "open to life" (i.e have children) before they agree to marry you in Church (in addition to banning contraceptives, abortions and porn).
They also believe that pursuit of wealth, status and greed is a sin and one should focus his attention inward , towards "God", "Family", and "Charity".. disincentivizing people from dedicating their lives to their careers and missing their chances of having kids. is it no surprise then, that they ten to have larger families?
What I'm trying to highlight here, isn't a celebration of religious practices but the fact that we need a massive cultural shift, first and foremost to resolve this issue and if I'm being honest, I don't see this happening anytime soon.. at least not in our hyper capitalist society.
I'm not sure many people (especially women) are willing to sacrifice their lifestyles, career aspirations and goals to have children.
Unless people are taught from birth that having kids is their sole purpose in life and that family, motherhood and communities are deeply celebrated by society, they will opt out of having kids.
The last line of the slide reads "Once you start thinking about these issues, it is hard to think about anything else: demography is destiny."
Raoul Pal primary thesis about macroeconomics is that Demographics is everything. Here is a 54 second video of him highlighting that issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJm_zFbIqPE
The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.
> the average number of years a woman spends being educated;
Have you a recent reference for that? I think even that correlation has broken down, but I do not know
The main researchers associated here are Samir KC and Wolfgan Lutz. Their latest update (with a long list of coauthors) is from 2024 [1]; this is a followup of the important 2013 paper [2].
[1] https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/19487/1/WP-24-003.pdf
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2344470
I don’t have any structured references saved, sorry.
My understanding is that the only real correlation is years in education, but this is at the national level; the very rich and very poor (which imperfectly correlates with level of education attained) tend to have more children than the middle class, but fertility rates are down across every income level. What this means is that if you look at two countries and see that one has a higher level of education than the other, you would expect the country with the higher level of education to have a lower fertility rate, but within both countries you would expect to see a relatively uniform decline in fertility across every income level, with a more pronounced decline around middle income levels.
This is maybe what’s being referenced when people saying they’ll have kids when capitalism gets sorted, but this isn’t seen in countries where standards of living have improved considerably.
The simplest theory is that more people are using contraceptives because they simply don’t want children. Some people might subjectively feel like they can’t afford to have children, but by world historical (and contemporary) standards of living this argument looks incredibly silly.
This totally ignores the fact that the decline in fertility is measurable across the globe in the poorest and wealthiest nations in the world. It's clearly not a simple matter of affordability...
Poor countries reproduce more, it's not same everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
The rates are plummeting everywhere. Even countries that have 3 or 4 kids per woman used to have 5 or 6 and are on pace to drop below replacement within 15-20 years.
Look at slide 3 again ("TFR around the world").
those are not the poorest countries (e.g. no african countries are listed either)
Our World in Data: Fertility rate: births per woman - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t...
To the surprise of demographers, African fertility is falling - https://www.mercatornet.com/to_the_surprise_of_demographers_... - September 19, 2024
> Previously in this space, under the heading “Africa Rising?” yours truly cited The Lancet’s latest population stats on sub-Saharan Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s only region with an above-replacement total fertility rate (TFR), currently estimated from 4.3 to 4.6. They’ve gone from 8 percent of global births in 1950 to 30 percent in 2021, headed to 54 percent by century’s end. While the region’s TFR is falling fast, any sub-Saharan population contraction is at least a century out. However, according to Macrotrends, Africa’s TFR (4.1) has declined an average of 1.3 percent annually over the last three years. Should this trend persist, Africa will eventually plunge into below-replacement territory. Demographers believe fertility decline is accelerating faster than projected, especially in sub-Sahara Africa. Statista, the European aggregator of figures, projects Africa’s 2030 TFR at 3.8.
Fertility rates fall as education levels rise in sub-Saharan Africa - https://www.nature.com/articles/d44148-025-00026-3 - January 29th, 2025
yes those are true but the fact remains that despite the falling rate, sub-saharan TFR is 4.5, while brazil is 1.6, iran 1.7 etc. The correlation of TFR with wealth is a fact
Brazil is 1.47, and Iran is 1.43. Both are lower than the United States.
Other poor countries lower than America: Mexico, Columbia, Philippines, Thailand
Source for TFRs: https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/67E402B3A81D9/media%2FGxYAq...
The correlation between wealth and fertility is quickly breaking down, both between countries and within (rich people have more kids, poor people have fewer).
Rent is the bigger issue than affordability per se. My wife pointed out the other day that we had our second and third kids shortly after we stopped living in apartments and bought a house. We didn't plan to have a significant age gap between our first (who we had in law school) and our other kids, and we earned a lot of money the whole time, it just happened that way. She's convinced that having the extra space subconsciously encouraged us to have more kids.
I've been encouraging my cousin who desperately wants children to have them in her two bedroom apartment but she feels that she needs to have a house first and she and her husband can't afford one. They're in their late 30s. My partner and I are mid-30s planning to have young children in our 2 bedroom apartment, we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO NOT EXIST in our Los Angeles neighborhood. More space means untenable commutes which brings more complicated childcare logistics (can't get to daycare before it closes, less time with kids etc).
> we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO NOT EXIST
This seems to be an absolute epidemic across the state. Same with condos. It's like they assume that apartments of any kind are only for single people and maybe a couple with one child. In other words, people who are dragging the fertility rate down toward 50%.
When I pull up Zillow and look at rentals across a huge swath of the East Bay, there are 8,309 apartments listed (I filtered out houses and townhomes). I add one filter: 3+ bedrooms. The number drops to 784. Fewer than 10% (!) of apartments listed have 3+ bedrooms. (Also, a quick spot check of these seems to show a nontrivial amount that are actually just houses with faulty metadata.)
This puts a tremendous burden on low-income people, to have to foot the higher cost of maintaining a home and/or of an absurd commute, just in order to have enough space[1] to have more than one kid. That, or overpay to compete for one of the few bigger apartments, many of which are "luxury" oriented.
Meanwhile, the high-income can afford a house or a luxury 3br apartment, but they are mostly high-income because they've deprioritized family, putting in 10+ years of being DINKs. In my circle of upper middle class tech types, many of them are 35-38 before having their first kid. 1 kid is much more likely than 3 for people starting in their late 30s, so this drags down fertility rates even among the "high income" subgroup!
[1] I know opinions vary on whether it's good and healthy to have kids sharing rooms, though imho I don't want a son and daughter forced to bunk together as they get older, and calls to 'just share rooms' is giving "Own nothing and be happy."
For what it's worth, we had our first child when we lived in a studio in our late 20s. One kid is really easy space-wise. The only reason we even got a 2BR before buying our house is that we got an au pair.
This did not stop people in the past. You read of three-room New York tenements holding families of ten, or families with half a dozen children living in a single-room frontier cabin, and this was considered commonplace.
My parents raised eleven children in a typical four-bedroom suburban tract house.
I wonder why modern people would be different?
Because we have an expectation for more space. Pretty simple, no one wants to go backwards to when we lived in single room tenements with a wife pumping out babies for a decade in a row. Also, no one can afford a four bedroom home with twelve occupants on a single income like in the 50s.
You couldn't in the 50s either. You just made do.
The drop in fertility rate is directly liked to migration into dense cities. They are just not a good place to have children.
The US resisted the fertility drop for much longer, because of higher suburban population.
Any data for this? I think this maybe the real answer because unlike other explanations, this one can actually acquire proof from before modern ages. Simply because it's known that cities fertility rates were always negative and have to constantly pull people from countryside.
> The US resisted the fertility drop for much longer, because of higher suburban population.
It was immigration, but next generation of all immigrants (native born) adopts host country total fertility rate in this context.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/08/hispanic-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/10/26/5-facts-a...
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FT_19... visually nails this.
Now, would these people have had a higher birth rate if they remained in their LATAM countries? The data indicates no.
Latin America’s Baby Bust Is Arriving Early - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-22/latin-... | https://archive.today/EPMAU - May 22nd, 2025
Population Prospects and Rapid Demographic Changes in the First Quarter of the Twenty-first Century in Latin America and the Caribbean - https://repositorio.cepal.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/dc5... - 2024
I read some unsubstantiated claim about cities being bad for fertility because there’s an abundance of things to do that aren’t popping out children
This is probably a factor, but I think it’s a mistake to treat cities not being suited for raising children as a hard, immutable fact. They’re bad because rent continues to soar which clashes on two fronts (kids are expensive already and increase space requirements) and we as a society have decided to build our urban spaces (suburbs included) to be explicitly not friendly to children, families, or anybody not driving and to instead favor adults with money to spend. These are things we could change, should we want to.
The other thing to look at is why people have migrated into cities, and the answer is pretty simple: it’s where the good employment prospects are. The further yet get away from urban cores the worse those get: fewer jobs, worse compensation and benefits, greater risk of being stuck between jobs for long periods of time. Anybody worried about birthrates should be embracing remote work and making sure they compensate their employees well.
It's not just rent, it's also transportation. Transporting young kids with a car is easy, public transportation is much harder until they are 10 or so.
For example try transporting a sleepy kid, or more than 1 young kid at the same time.
Cities are cars don't get along very well, which makes them less friendly to kids.
Suburbs are really nice for kids, basically zero car traffic, you can play in the street, easily go to parks. And when the parents need to take you far you have a car available.
Transportation can be a challenge, but I don’t agree that a car is a requirement. When I’m in Japan it’s common to see parents carting around a kid or two on an appropriately kitted out bike for example. That wouldn’t be as practical in a sprawling suburb, but it can work in denser cities.
> Suburbs are really nice for kids, basically zero car traffic, you can play in the street, easily go to parks. And when the parents need to take you far you have a car available.
This varies a lot depending on the suburb. There are many that are endless house-deserts where you’re not doing anything without a ride. The one where I live is much more broken up, but sidewalk coverage is patchy at best.
While I generally agree with this and am angry at "the elites" who seem to both want increased fertility but also don't really target it in their companies ... I think the bigger unspoken issue is really the TFR skew. Global fertility can go down for a while and it isn't disastrous. TFR skew results in large problems if the least progressive and poorest groups systematically have much higher TFR over extended periods.
None of the solutions I can think of are very appealing or even tolerable. It really feels like it's a matter of carrying on and having hope. But perhaps we could start by merely describing the data and the situation.
The thing that collapses in a negative population growth environment is passive earnings from interest and asset appreciation, retirement, and to some extent social welfare states. The whole idea of things like social security is predicated on a growing population paying for the elderly. It's also very, very bearish for things like real estate long term. We are probably still in a real estate bubble.
I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall about this since I was in my twenties.
I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like climate change and natural resource depletion.
Social security is solvent for at least the next 75 years if the US removes the payroll cap on contributions from wage income. We choose not to. The economic resources exist for these social programs, it will just diminish profits (the horror /s). It's a policy choice.
Every year total fertility rate remains lower than replacement rate further locks in the fertility curve, but there is no political will or desire to implement the fixes required. So, we keep kicking the can until we cannot anymore. It's unfortunate. Demographic destiny comes regardless, as each year total fertility rate continues to fall.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-...
https://www.pgpf.org/article/social-security-reform-options-...
By 2075, Medicare and Social Security will reach a over 14% of GDP combined, up from around 8% today. To pay that, we'll have to raise taxes by $1.75 trillion using today's GDP figures. That will require just about doubling payroll taxes from the present level.
That's probably an underestimate. As population shrinks, GDP will shrink as well, unless we have large gains in productivity, which have stalled. It's not clear to me that the projections about SS/Medicare as a percentage of GDP account for the effect of GDP shrinking due to population decline. CBO assumes a stable population through 2060, using quite arbitrary assumptions about immigration: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875.
I agree with your observations. The future will not be as bright as the past, the population boom was already squeezed for the gains. Immigration at the levels needed to change this are unpalatable to most electorates, and with total fertility rate dropping across the world, it's important to be mindful that net migration to Earth is 0 (slide 39). As the economic future deteriorates due to the ever increasing drag of these obligations, I'd expect total fertility rate to continue to decline at present rates (if not slightly accelerate). This creates a self reinforcing feedback loop. A "Demographic Doom Loop" [1].
Happiness is reality minus expectations.
[1] https://x.com/KenRoth/status/1753526235173450213 | https://archive.today/rY4WG
All that said, I agree with your general point that the situation with the welfare state is probably fixable, if we don’t enter a doom loop. It’s just more burdensome than lifting the SS cap.
I’m more optimistic about non-western countries. I suspect descendants of Puritans will be a historical curiosity in 2500 but I think Muslims and Mormons will still exist.
The welfare state has to collapse before people realize children are their retirement plan, and that there’s no guarantee the government will take care of them in old age.
There is no guarantee your children will take care of you. Walk through any nursing or care home and speak with residents, ask the last time a child saw them.
One quarter of adult children estranged from a parent - https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4104138-one-qua... - July 19th, 2023
> There is no guarantee your children will take care of you
On the flip side, for those childless, it's completely guaranteed none will.
> One quarter of adult children estranged from a parent
That sounds like a 75% success rate.
doubtful 75% is all high quality. The one quarter is probably all really bad, then some of that 75% is bad enough that it won't make much difference. Probably 25% is so into their parents that they will actually take care of them.
Why does nobody ever factor in the gigantic growth in government?
'hoarding more and more of the wealth'. Sounds very much like you believe in the pie fallacy. A zero sum game? Maybe that's not what you meant though.
The pie has nothing to do with it.
The tide is rising and most ships are sinking. Productivity in the last 40 years has skyrocketed. The gains have overwhelmingly gone to a tiny minority while everyone else has seen rent, food, education, and more go up dramatically faster than wages. This has accelerated in the last 15 years and has destroyed any faith in the social contract.
Have you noticed the massive growth in government? You're paying for it, one way or another.
Inflation is caused by the government via deficit spending. It's another tax on you.
Inflation isn't the problem. Corporate consolidation, collusion, price fixing, and market capture are the problems.
In nearly every field where there used to be 10-20 competitors there are 2-4 and they're not doing much "competing" any more. They're using consultants and third parties to share data and fix prices, they're buying up the entire supply and dividing areas so they have monopolies.
Note how during the COVID "inflation" corporate profits soared faster than inflation.
> In nearly every field where there used to be 10-20 competitors there are 2-4 and they're not doing much "competing" any more.
I'm old, and I've heard that my entire life. Something's wrong with your assessment.
The pie isn't always growing and the pie isn't always static. There are times where either can happen. I think people are just feeling that we are entering a period where the pie will be stagnant for a while. In the short term the world might be a zero sum game.
> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
Historically that's never been a requirement for people to make children. Poor people have tended to be pretty prolific.
> hoarding more and more of the wealth
In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".
Is there an upper bound to the creation of wealth? Is it infinite? Are there any limits to its creation? Is there any inherent value to it without being able to "transfer"?
'In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".'
That's a theory from economists. Economists have a lot of theories.
It's a fact, not a theory. The wealth in the economy did not exist 100 years ago. Therefore it must have been created.
And where did Musk's money come from? Who did he transfer it from?
If I cut down trees to build a house, then I may have created "wealth" but I've also destroyed trees. Now the net affect may be that wealth has increased, but it may also have an effect which actually destroys wealth like for instance if those trees existed on a hill, and the roots were holding the soil in place, the act of cutting down
"Free market" economics does not capture this destruction of value. It only cares that some value was extracted out of the trees in the form of a new home sale, etc.
I'm sure all those slaves brought over to the New World created tremendous wealth, but I'm also pretty sure they would have rather preferred to stay in Africa.
> "Free market" economics does not capture this destruction of value.
Oh, but it does. It turns out that people who own land take care of it, so that it keeps producing. People who own timber land tend to manage it so it continues to be productive.
Destruction happens with government owned land.
For a related example, why are we not running out of cattle, hogs, and chickens, despite slaughtering them on an epic scale? And why are we running out of fish?
Come on. Sometimes wealth gets created. Sometimes wealth just gets moved around. That is a fact.
Musk's wealth is mostly notional. Most of it is based on people's guesses about the future of electric cars and so forth. It's not clear yet whether that is creation or transfer or what.
Musk's wealth was transferred from nobody. It was created.
When wealth gets "moved around", that is not the market doing that. It's force. Like social security payments.
That's why I prefaced it with "free market".
Maybe a startup can have a high valuation for a while and ultimately be worth nothing. Maybe that has happened.
Maybe Musk will turn out to have created 10x more wealth than he has now. Maybe he will screw up and go broke.
Maybe both.
Where did Bernie Madoff's wealth come from before he got caught? Where did Sam Bankman-Fried's wealth come from? We can't just point to a unit of wealth and automatically applaud its legal owner as having created it. Maybe they created it. Maybe they stole it. Maybe we all wigged out and handed it to them voluntarily. It's case by case.
We all read Ayn Rand back in the day. And I can groove with that at a certain dosage, but you're taking way too much.
Bernie Madoff defrauded people by selling them fake investments.
Note that I remarked that free markets did not include fraud.
Excluding fraud, theft, and so forth, just by definition, means we're talking about a utopia. It's not a system, it's some beautiful subset of what's really going on. The subset would have to be carefully selected, using information we don't actually have until (maybe) much later. Maybe never.
This 'free market' is a bit like clean matter-antimatter power stations. They sound like a great idea. We could build them if we knew how.
I never claimed free markets were utopian. The purpose of government in a free market economy is to provide justice for acts of force or fraud, and provide enforcement of contracts.
There is no such thing as a perfect free market. However, history shows that the closer we are to them, the more prosperous the country is.
BTW, when the Soviet Union was formed, the communists did away with the police because there would no longer be a need for them. Oops.
Some wealth is created. People build new things and sell them. Video Games or Programming Languages for example.
Some wealth is just transferred, like rent or interest.
It would be nice if everybody had somewhere to live for free, unfortunately, most people have to pay rent or interest on a mortgage to those that came before them.
> Some wealth is just transferred, like rent or interest.
Both of those are an exchange, not a transfer. Taxation is a transfer.
They may be an exchange, but they are not "creation".
We are arguing whether wealth flows to people who already have it, rather people who "create it". My augment is both.
An artist creates wealth by painting a beautiful painting. Then he exchanges that wealth for money.
At no point was wealth "transferred" to the artist.
McDonald's creates wealth by designing and building a system to deliver hamburgers. McDonald's then exchanges that wealth for cash from its customers.
BTW, who gives money to people who already have it? Not me. I doubt you do, either. I don't know anybody who does. The transactions are always exchanges - you are getting something in return.
I think perhaps you are discussing too many threads simultaneously. I'm fully onboard with Maccas and Artists creating something thus creating wealth.
Also, yes, transaction are exchanges. Nobody is arguing that. You pay rent and in exchange you may use the land (productively or not)
My argument is that people are forced to pay rent to people who didn't create anything, but because they hold a piece of paper that says they own it.
The argument is, did the person who owns the land "create" anything. My argument is no.
> And where did Musk's money come from?
No body (?) is contending that in a free market wealth is not created.
The contention is that when wealth is created it tends to head to other wealth.
When a bank lends capital and has a choice of lending to, say, Elon Musk or me, I think the bank will make that rational choice and lend to Elon. Thus once you have some wealth attracting more wealth is less difficult than from before you had wealth
This pattern is repeated over a d over.
See Captain Grimes' boot theory of economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Lending money is not transferring wealth, nor is it creating wealth. It nets out to zero.
This is clear when one does accounting. Accounting is based on the idea that (Equity = Assets - Liabilities). When one takes out a loan, the assets go up by the amount of the loan, and the liabilities also go up by the amount of the loan. The Equity stays the same. That this balances out is literally called "balancing the books".
BTW, banks are happy to lend out money to people that have a track record of paying it back. This includes poor people. Poor people have credit cards, too, which is how they borrow money.
This part is true, and the folks who equate new borrowings with income are liable to do some real damage if anybody ever listens to them.
Ah, the boots theory.
A Ferrari costs far, far more to maintain than a Ford, and doesn't last as long. I drove my used Ford Bronco II for 32 years before giving it to a scrap yard. Best bang for the buck car ever.
Expensive shirts wear out just as fast as cheap shirts. They just look nicer (and are often less comfortable).
P.S. I still regularly wear the combat boots my dad bought me 50 years ago. The boot black on them has long since disappeared, but they still keep my feet dry and warm.
Nice assertions, but where’s the content of your post? What’s your opinion here based on those two things? Those are just two statements, but do you believe things are different now than historically or are you arguing it’s the same as it ever was, or something else?
I’m probably not old enough yet to share my opinion on societal change across generations, I was a kid until recently.
Do you think the population of the US is all from immigration and rich people?
(A relative worked out our family tree. Lots of families with 8 kids in them.)
> In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".
The free market hasn't figured out how to create more land. Especially arable land.
It has figured out how to make better use of the land.
> In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated"
That is incorrect
In a free market wealth has a definite tendency to clump together, to concentrate.
A moment's thought will make clear why.
> A moment's thought will make clear why.
Take a moment and elaborate, please.
How do you define "free market"?
Transactions based on free negotiations, not force or fraud.
Maybe expecting every single person to work and no one to homestead and care for the kids, within a system that explicitly does not support families, was a mistake. (Please note that I did not gender the roles. My best friend is a stay-at-home dad and he is amazing. They can afford to do this, though, because his wife's compensation is extremely high.)
Expectations are part of it, but regardless of compensation or lack thereof it turns out that a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children. Child rearing is essential, and rewarding in many ways. But it's also exhausting, repetitive, and frustrating. It's not surprising that given the choice many adults would rather spend time around other adults instead of children. In the past most societies kind of "solved" this inherent problem by artificially restricting women's but obviously that's not acceptable or even feasible now.
The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.
The mid-century Baby Boom came after WWII, and probably had very little to do with technology. The upswing started some time in late 1944 to mid 1945 as combat was winding down in Europe and a lot of young men were returning home. Otherwise fertility has been declining steadily since 1800 in western countries.
See https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-boom-wh...
I don’t agree with Thompson, his start date is the place where fertility hit a local minimum, not the year where the rate really took off which was 1946. A lot of the technological innovations actually predated his arguable start date by 5-10 years and several happened well into the boom.
I think his explanation fits the thesis of his recent book, which I actually like, but it seem a bit off here.
No, this is exactly the opposite of true: you need to do more reading about the baby boom. It happened across many countries, including ones which had little involvement in WWII, and in almost all cases it began in the 1930s, even with the Great Depression underway. It got supercharged by the end of the war because that's when the economic doldrums finally ended, but upward trend in fertility predated even the beginning of the war, never mind the end.
The technological explanation wouldn’t really account for any increase in places where 1930s and 40s technology hadn’t been deployed. I’d need a little more than hand waving to evaluate or engage with your argument.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-u...
The above shows the boom started in the 40s in the U.S. after 140 years of gradual decline.
Baby booms normally happen after a big war. After all the death, people have a primal urge to procreate.
I read that people were copulating in the streets of London the day of the Armistice.
For a technological solution, I've previously suggested changing the male/female ratio of new births. Filter out most of the Y bearing sperm cells.
In this new imbalanced society, a TFR well below 2 will still allow a stable, or even growing, population.
Who is going to fix things, then?
Late child birth is not about fertility but about risks for the child. The only woman I know (yeah, anecdotes) who attempted to delay getting a child until after her 40th birthday got a baby with down syndrome. I know what living with a disability in our world means, from personal experience. And given that experience, I have a hard time giving these women some slack. I think they are risking the well being of their children just for their own selfish reasons. We are humans, and there are limits to what we can do. We need to accept them, or we will make other people suffer.
My concern is the intersection of rightwing natalism with Silicon Valley ideology leading to technological “solutions” involving, essentially, test tube babies. Take women out of the picture entirely. I can especially see a dystopian dynamic involving the “we have to compete with China” or “they’re doing it / about to do it in China” narratives.
A "test tube baby" is simply an IVF pregnancy. What is the problem with parents using IVF to conceive?
That’s a colloquial term for IVF pregnancies but that’s not what I mean. I mean artificial wombs, and all the other technologies downstream from a push to “scale up” procreation: like robots that can raise children.
Nah, the right wing solution would be replacing prison with compulsory pregnancy. Sufficient numbers of convicts can be created by appropriate laws.
if we have all those robots doing everything for us, why do we need children?
If we have all those robots doing everything we are we needed?
We could just kill ourselves, since we don't seem to care much for life, reproduction, and all that.
Ugo Bardi has a post: https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/what-if-malthus-was-righ...
The selection effects of this transition will be really fascinating to see after the fact. The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids", but is being subjected for the first time to "having more kids while extreme prosperity and modern telecommunications exist" which is a very different thing.
> The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids"
This needs to be carefully qualified. Infant mortality rates for the first 99% of human history were so shockingly, stupefyingly high, that a woman might only expect to have about three of her children survive to adulthood (and maternal mortality rates were also so high that a woman wouldn't expect to survive more childbirths than 5 or 6).
What this means is that the human population was only marginally above replacement for the majority of human history. Human population didn't explode until the medicinal revolution.
I had an evolutionary bio professor in college say this: "you don't understand evolution until you understand how contraception could lead to overpopulation."
Anything placed in the path of reproduction is a barrier to be overcome.
If there is anything in the human genome that correlates with a positive desire to choose to have children, we are selecting hard for that right now. We may see a bottleneck this century and then a gigantic population explosion next century as a result, with a world full of people with very loud "biological clocks" who just adore and crave babies.
That is assuming this is genetically determined enough to be a target for selection. There are probably correlates that are, and I could speculate endlessly about what they are, but I also know that such speculations are likely to be wrong because these systems are complex and often counter-intuitive.
One I've speculated about recently is negativity bias. It seems to me that a lot of people choosing not to have kids right now are doing so because of negativity bias, because they see the world as a terrible place as a result of their consumption of negative media. Historically negativity bias may be something that's been selected for, but this may now have flipped. Optimists may have higher fitness now while pessimists did pre-industrialization and pre-modernity. But again, speculation.
What do you / your prof think about the timelines though? I always heard people shoot these kinds of arguments down by saying that evolution does not significantly operate on our accelerated timelines of human technology.
How long an evolutionary change takes can vary widely depending on a ton of factors: current makeup of the gene pool, strength of selection, whether it's a single or multiple gene trait, whether and to what extent there are counter-pressures selecting in the other way, and so on. It's very hard to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution
The future is probably a society with more robots than humans.
We can see this happening now at Amazon. Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis. Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots. Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.
How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-o...
The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B).
Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.
The simple Kiva mobile platforms are most of the robot count, but they replaced large numbers of people who did walk around warehouses moving stuff from A to B.
IIRC Amazon laid off the entire team that was working on manipulation research at the Boston area Amazon Robotics
they should form a union
I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong.
The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M.
You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.)
Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging.
Then there are obvious economic measures, etc.
The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.
Zoom in on Kinshasa though and you can see that it's almost entirely very densely-packed slums and shantytowns built up against each other, about 100 - 250 square meters in size, with no gardens or back yards. Slums can be very dense, Dharavi in Mumbai 2.3 square KM with a population of about a million. Manhattan has a much lower population density now than 100 years ago.
Also in all the street view pictures it looks absolutely packed - every road is gridlocked with people everywhere, but Shanghai has a lot of empty space for people despite its size. Roads have trees, they're much wider, there are a lot of open parks, office buildings etc that Kinshasa wouldn't have.
I just did what you suggested and looked at Kinshasa and it looks HUGE to me. Endless rows of streets. Reminded me of Mexico City (and I just compared satellite imagery and they seem similar in that respect - and they are similar in terms of population). Big cities with few skyscrapers and tons of low rise buildings are quite common. In the west, Paris is an example of a populous city without many tall buildings.
Kinshasa's urban area (not the entire province) is generously estimated at 600 square km.
Mexico City is 1485 square km.
Mexico City's population, within that 1485 km^2 envelope, is most commonly given as ~9.5M. (It's ~20M with satellite towns and regions.)
And then consider that most of Kinshasa is comprised of buildings that are very low to the ground -- far lower than in Paris -- whereas Mexico City is in places very dense.
I drove right around Africa through 35 countries over three years. I drove across both Nigeria and the DRC.
There are dozens and dozens of massive cities that take hours to cross in Nigeria you’ve never heard of. Anecdotally, it’s way, way, way more populous than anything nearby. Ethiopia felt somewhat similar in parts, as did Egypt.
Can you name a few of them in Nigeria? On satellite imaging, from what I've seen, they're not so massive, and they're mostly comprised of a sprawl of 1-3 story buildings.
We can compare vs. cities that we have good numbers for. Or Chinese/Indian cities, for that matter. (After looking at Nigeria or the DRC, a quick glance at India via satellite imaging is shocking.)
That said, Egypt is very populous, there's no doubt about that one.
I drove through at least 10 cities in Nigeria I’ve never heard of that had tons of buildings over 10 stories. I just took the fastest route across, I didn’t go wandering. This was 10 years ago too.
Also remember the DRC is almost a million square miles. So it’s 1.5x Alaska.
Sigh.
Personal experience Vs. looking at pictures from the basement....
I expect it to be USA policy soon.
Thank you for this. Nigerian here, and I have to say that you hit the nail squarely on the head. Population counts in Nigeria are deeply political and essentially every region/state is motivated to fake/overestimate their headcount to get a bigger chunk of the oil revenue, which is pretty much the most significant slice of gov. revenue.
But, once you dig into the figures, you realize it'd be a miracle if Nigeria has up to half of the population it claims.
Every single census that's been conducted has been marred by controversy, with states trying to buff up their populations to make their ethnicity/region look bigger and more important.
But, proxies like registered BVN (like Social Security Number, but for bank accounts) are just under 70M. Registered phone lines (~240M; each person usually owns 3-5) are similarly lackluster. Domestic demand is nothing to write home about if you run a CPG business. Zoom into a satellite view of a city that's supposed to have ~700k to 1M people and it looks like a suburb - just scanty.
Nigeria's most populous city claims to have 20M people - 2* the population of Seoul, one of the most urbanized, dense, vertical cities in the world, meanwhile, Lagos is just a sprawling slum.
Personally, I feel population counts across Africa are grossly overestimated. A good estimate would be 600-800M, but where's the fun in that when we can fearmonger about overpopulation?
Even better personal experience
You estimate a factor of two for over estimate, believable, but higher than I would have thought. Makes sense with the context of getting more revenue. Thank you
I caution you against the "I looked at satellite image" nonsense. Your lived experience is very valuable. Looking at a satellite image is not
Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly living off their state pension.
As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree, too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7 more years to reproduce.
I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.
Hopefully the deflation scenario due to technology will help with this shift gracefully. Else, it will be extremely difficult.
But if we had deflation in the economy, how will the investment scenario will Peter out is anyone’s guess.
I wonder The people who invented this financial growth will, why they didn’t thought about this in the long term? I guess, I have asked a question which has quite a generic answer already…
>I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people.
In South Florida it's always been like that or more.
No imagination required :)
> can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people.
We're currently trending towards a birth rate of 1 or less. This means 4/5 will be retirees in three generations.
Your 1/3 figure is wildly optimistic. Little chance it will be that good.
A substantial realignment in the economy is what's coming. The charge will be when the rate of vacated homes starts to uptick as their aren't enough capable people to live in them: right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand, but those retirement figures imply a different reality as time goes on: eventually those people start going into care facilities, but their won't be nearly enough people around to supply the demand for the properties they're finally moving out from.
The real markets are absolutely not ready for that reality.
> right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand
The major metros have the least to worry about from this. Those cities have high housing costs because of demand, or to put it another way, those cities have high demand despite high housing costs, and the economic factors that cause people to be attracted to cities aren't going to go away; density is devastatingly efficient and it's cheaper and more convenient for people to be close to things. But what this means is that as the population falls, that latent demand causes the less dense, lower-priced areas to depopulate. See Japan's crisis of rural depopulation, and how Tokyo isn't the one feeling the pinch.
Case in point - Japan, with so many abandoned homes
Little mention of automation in the labor discussion. Also, no real discussion of the consumerism aspect of the economy when talking about worker productivity.
Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.
one small thing = https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BFI_WP_2...
and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”
The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand:
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
Progressive taxation will generally mean that anyone under the median income has a negative net impact on the government's finances. All this study is doing is reflecting the obvious fact that immigrants are by and large working class.
Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population. That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
> Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population
Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.
> That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
If the surplus economic value created by immigrants who are employed is generally not returned to them in the form of high wages, then yeah, they're not going to be paying it to the government as taxes.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that a lot of people in this thread seem to be conflating per-person net economic benefit and net tax payments. The first can be significantly positive while the second is negative.
> Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.
If you have cheap labor who draw more in public services than they pay in taxes, then you're using tax dollars to effectively subsidize private profits. Maybe that's the unstated rationale, but few proponents of immigration would say that out loud.
Why are the demographics of a small Nordic nation something "everyone" should understand? Whenever I've pointed to how well the social safety nets work in these countries and how they could be an example for the US, I've been told that the US is too different of a country to draw an analogy.
Denmark has been the most systematic about collecting this sort of data about immigrants from different places. I suspect you’d see similar results in the UK and Canada if those governments collected the data. Canada’s GDP per capita has actually started declining recently.
I think Denmark’s welfare system is a model, so whoever you’re arguing with, it’s not me. I will point out that, if Denmark with its robust welfare system can’t integrate MENAPT immigrants effectively, that doesn’t bode well for other countries with less efficient welfare states.
Net cost to a national government and GDP per capita are not the same thing. Presumably these people become more productive by moving to more developed countries; that's the general reason that people immigrate to particular places. My impression without looking at the data is that US GDP per capita has continued to increase despite large (called a crisis by Republicans) numbers of immigrants during the Biden Administration. And given that these people are not citizens of the US, presumably they will not be eligible for all benefits granted to citizens which would decrease their cost to the government.
What is MENAPT here?
Middle East, northern africa, pakistan
…and Turkey, the T in MENAPT.
Denmark has shown a rather pronounced distaste for integrating people into the workforce whose names signify non European origins.
In contrast to Sweden, which decided to simply stop collecting data on certain things whenever a given statistic began to become inconvenient with respect to asylum and immigration policies.
Over what timespan? This analysis isn't elaborated at all. Does it count the impact of companies being able to pay lower wages and paying more taxes? Does it account for the future generations? Etc.
It’s explained in the link. Figure 2.7. It covers immigrants and their descendants across all ages. Here’s further analysis of the same data: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/01/immigration-economics-f...
Intuitvely, those opposing immigration have always known this. But tell that t someone from the left They will verbally kill you for stating obvious facts.
Intuition alone really isn't to be trusted with public policy decisions of this magnitude.
I agree, but shouldn’t the burden be on the people advocating mass immigration to prove it helps?
No, because freedom of movement and commerce (specifically, selling one's labor) are human rights. No right is absolute, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
There is no “human right” to cross national borders. It’s the opposite. International law recognizes both the collective right of “peoples”—groups of people—to form nations, and the right of nations to their territorial integrity.
> the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
Every country on earth claims this.
The left vs right theatre is really just two sides of the same coin. By now every western democracy is being dragged along the same path with different stages of progression.
1. Move domestic production and jobs to lesser developed countries to increase profits.
2. Open the gates for mass immigration under the guise of openness and empathy to import wage slaves for the service sector and use every media channel to ostracize anyone who utters the slightest doubt about this policy.
3. Aggressively push DEI and gender ideology to alienate the social-democratic left from the academic left and drown out any other popular left topics like worker's rights or class warfare.
4. Amplify polarization on social media by creating as many conflicts as possible (left vs right, old vs young, men vs women, natives vs immigrants, ...).
5. Promote a right-wing populist party and trick enough people into voting for it.
6. Move the tax burden from the rich to the middle and lower class and remove regulations and restrictions on companies while ignoring all the other problems.
7. Establish surveillance and authoritarian rule under the guise of safety.
Everyone in this so-called culture war is being played, so maybe it's time to stop being smug about being smarter than the other side and start contemplating if there is any common idea that we can agree on that allows us to go forward.
You realize different kinds of immigrants go to different places? Do you think that immigrants from Bangladesh are a net cost at every country they go to including Pakistan?
Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
how is Paul Ehrlich linked to the original post?
what is he wrong about?
Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve completely to death with no aid). He believed that the sustainable population for the planet was one billion.
He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."
India got there on overpopulation. Total fertility rate around 6 in 1965. India does not have enough water for its population.[1] China would have hit similar problems if not for their one-child policy. China managed to avoid the overshoot when medicine starts to work but the economy hasn't developed yet. India didn't.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_India
If you have access to the sea and to uranium you can make all the freshwater you need, even recycle your own wastewater nearly infinitely.
This is a technological and economic problem, not an overpopulation problem.
Erlich did not say "there will be scarcity." Erlich said that there would be hundreds of millions dead to starvation.
Unfortunately a lot of people are now saying we need extreme curtailing of rights -- largely womens' rights -- because of underpopulation. The answer to every panic is always curtailing of rights. Scary thing may happen therefore we need big alpha ape to fix it for us by bashing people on head with big rock. Grunt, grunt.
Right this is what I am saying. And I think that we should be outrageously skeptical of such people and oppose them with fervor. In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe. These people were wrong in every possible dimension and has we listened to them we would have committed a world-historic evil.
Similarly, we are starting to see people say that we need to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world (this time based on gender) in order to prevent future catastrophe. I suspect that these people will be wrong in every possible dimension and that if we listen to them that we will be committing a world-historic evil.
> In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe.
What is this referring to?
Erlich (and others) said that we needed to do the following
* programs of mass sterilization in the third world
* a "triage" program where we partition the third world into "savable" and "unsavable" zones, block all movement between these zones, and expel the unsavable zones from our world order such that they will simply all starve to death.
It was all very very racist.
I kinda think this answers the question as to why these ideas get a pass: they offer a way to be racist and advocate racist eugenics policies without admitting you are racist, even to yourself.
I see racism in the population collapse panic too unfortunately, at least in the popular discourse around it. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.
Paging rayiner: I believe his dad was involved in population planning for the Ford Foundation in BD.
In the 70s, under IMF guidance, several governments of 3rd world countries implemented policies of mass sterilization.
Which people are saying we need to curtail womens' rights because of underpopulation?
It's a huge theme on the secular nationalist right. Visit Xhitter for 5 minutes.
The modern-day Malthus, except so much worse, because he had the example of Malthus but chose to ignore the lesson there
This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the social welfare state.
That depends very much on how technology progresses during coming decades. If we get something like AGI, then having less working age people may be a good thing, because there will be much, much less demand for white collar workers at least.
In the mid 2000's when I was a kid, at school I was taught that there would be a HUGE labour shortage once certain large generations retire, as younger generations are much smaller. Guess what, they retired a decade ago, and yet my country has the second highest unemployment rate in EU, with a very weak job market for fresh graduates in particular. Increased efficiency & automation ate all those jobs, nobody was hired to replace many of the boomers who retired. I doubt the future will be any different.
Social welfare state will still exist, it'll just be more costly as drag than it is today (in the US, ~$1.1T/year of uncompensated caregiving occurs, for example). Capitalism is more the challenge, it's built on squeezing the aggregate working age population for profits, and that cohort is in terminal decline over the long term. Between global sovereign debt load [1] and the demand for future profits (slides 31-33 of this PDF), there will be sadness as the future has less and less humans to saddle these economic burdens on. Such are the breaks when you predicate a socioeconomic system on never ending growth, and growth is over because humans globally (for various complex and interwoven issues) are choosing to have less children or no children.
[1] https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt ("Global public debt surpasses $100 trillion in 2024.")
A tfr of 1.7, the welfare state will be costly but exist. A tfr of .73 like korea has? Long term, that’s 1 20 year old and 3 45 year olds taking care of half a baby, 7 70 year olds and 10 95 year olds
It is what it is. You do the best you can with what you have.
societies and states have been doing fine without welfare for centuries
"doing fine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
The sheer confidence with which someone working a white collar desk job posts this in the AI age is astounding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk
Recorded talk for the slides in this post.
> Don’t we care about output per capita?
Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down.
> Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but...
> our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output.
Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated.
> We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this.
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system.
> Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder.
Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth?
> Affordable housing:
Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.
[dead]
When I posted the same result a few weeks ago, it got [flagged] in short order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520297
I'm sorry that happened to you, but the Atlantic is such a troll, I can understand why it was flagged.
I feel like slide 39 would have gotten you chased out of polite society 10 years ago.
A lot of western countries economies are built on sustained mass migration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Arguably the United States where both parties champion it (turn the other check to illegal migraiton of the democrats VS mass H1B visas of the republicans).
As this study points out, it's not sustainable.
This is all well and good, but population dropping will only impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact.
Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping.
The much larger worry should be Climate Change, a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the population falling.
Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling resources.
EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big fear, the rich may have to start paying more.
> For the poor, it will have no real impact.
It will likely bring back the problem of old age destitution as rule, not exception. It's a previously common scourge that never went completely away[1][2], but went into the sidelines by early-mid XX century, and is set to coming back with a vengeance, by the time current people in their 20s-30s reach old age. It hits the poor hard.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/successful-educated-but-no...
[2] https://citizenmatters.in/mumbai-abandoned-destitute-elderly...
The history of the world and economics is far more nuanced than rich people hoarding wealth. Wealth is the economy, it's created from systems. The feudal system in the medieval age was relatively poor at generating wealth. A series of technological and intellectual developments began to rapidly increase in the 1400s that culminated in the modern era, including especially the printing press.
But in the 1300s serfdom was still the norm in Europe. Serfs did not get paid and so the Plague made no difference except 2/3 of the population died. Serfdom would last another several hundred years after the plague, and in some countries all the way to the 20th century.