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!
In society an affair is still an affair even if no PV intercourse occurred. Sex comes under the category of “I’ll know it when I see it” / “just understood” things most humans do not realize has very fuzzy edges. The narrow definition is, from the autism perspective, one of the many useless definitions. You will be better served by (yet another) exhaustive list of edge cases.
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. A particularly excruciating example is the transition of the intended meaning of "literally" to increasingly mean "figuratively", particularly in social contexts. Makes me want to tear the skin off my face, lol.
While this isn't strictly relegated to social concepts, I understand how frustrating it can be to struggle to navigate this phenomenon in social contexts and be misinterpreted as a bad faith actor.
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.
Thanks for the reply. I do have similar impedance mismatches with the social consensus in a lot of areas. In everyday life I basically do what you are suggesting, but internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close.
I do sometimes wonder whether mass education and extensive media exposure from childhood have essentially brainwashed all but the most stubborn-minded of us, who are then labeled “autistic”.
On the topic, if we did take a strict definition of sex, this seems like a fruitful angle of attack for traditionalists. Like, today gay men are regarded as having lots and lots of sex, which is awesome. But if you take this other perspective, most of them are virgins, which is lame. I wonder why the traditionalists/far right haven’t taken this propaganda approach…
> internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close.
Ever tried flipping the lid on this?
You'd start opening up a lot of people. Those who would try to use that against you or judge have no relevance since they are not close anyway.
> why the traditionalists/far right haven’t taken this propaganda approach ...
they have little, low quality sex and any debate about it would force them to face this, even though it barely matters to them but admitting weakness with something so brutally natural is way above their heads.
if they didn't "make" their partner orgasm, ever, are they real men or gay men in disguise? (their thoughts, not mine, I think they are gay for other reasons)
it's similar to how young people used to or still do laugh about older men needing Viagra.
b) traditionalists and far right have build a merry go round in a dead end, "Sackgasse" in German.
it's a top down dogma.
they cannot have arguments that extend established ways of reasoning before their kind has engineered context and research within which their reasoning follows proper logic (see Quillete (don't) for lots of examples, or rationalists and autistic people easily running with the magic money herd).
they end up having to face the secret life's and thoughts of their partners, realizing they were actively kept in line so that their superiors and peers can reign freely vs having to compete with them, which would extend their minds, freedom and literal happiness.
> We Don’t Participate in Pre-marital or Extra-marital Sex
Yeah, people say that a lot but if you know church people, you know that they are, on average, pretty much like all the other liars.
Except they might hope to get punished for their sins, which does make for some nice and regular kinky evenings, I guess, but that would only be true for people further to the right of the bell curve, if you believe.
Also: the suspense and excitement in fantasies definitely improves the experience. And living free of bullshit other than the classics in the Bible and the consequences of a virtuous and communal life don't sound too bad of a foreplay at all.
No offense, but I'm not particularly interested in helping wargame propaganda strategies for either side of culture war debates. I'm not particularly interested in seeing culture zealots succeed at dehumanizing people, regardless of alignment.
Edit: I understand you see the topic of discussion as an abstract strategic question. I don't, and I'm not particularly interested in embracing that framing. We seem to have different fundamental values and framing here and I'm unsure of whether it's productive for me to advocate my framing, when you may not be particularly interested in embracing my framing either. I certainly have no right to demand you must accept my framing, but if we've reached a values/framing-based impass here, then I sincerely wish you all the best in life, but I will respectfully decline to engage further - it doesn't seem productive for either of us to continue if we both come from frameworks that are mutually incompatible with one another.
Well I don’t think any influential people from any political jostling group are reading all comments on hacker news, so I doubt we are helping to war game anything.
Your second paragraph seems like ad hominem? Or are you suggesting that homosexuality emerges from lived experience, and therefore I should relate? I am confused.
I don’t really have a dog in the gay fight. The longstanding cultural view in the west going back a very long time was that it is a choice. Some political people today retain that view. The modern view is that it isn’t a choice. Some political people today hold that view. I just look at the sides in a detached game theoretic way and it just seems like the red team has a move they haven’t played.
Is that bad? I do understand not wanting to go there mentally, since it is definitely hard to hold views apart from most of society, even if the view is “things are less clear than what everyone thinks they are”. I think humans generally seem to have some preprocessing that drops view candidates that would put them in that position.
I assure you, your thoughts on this are not unique or something hardly anyone thinks about, they're just not well reasoned. People have sex for a lot of reasons, and having children is, proportionally, almost never the primary driver. Sex is not the act of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm. If it was, we would call IVR 'sex', which obviously nobody does.
I never said sex was the act of fertilization, you are putting words in my mouth. I also never said anything about recreational sex, I of course agree that exists and is sex. You seem to be disagreeing while saying a bunch of things I agree with.
> 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.
I have thought about this a lot over the years and your comment only enforces my opinion: we think more about procreation and having children when we are in more survivally stressful situation. That's why developed societies have less children and poor people have more: rich people or people with enough wealth to live comfortably don't have a lot of children because they don't face death every day and don't feel the need to spread their genes.
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.
Sex is for procreation; even when done for sport, the biological studies show that changes happen hormonally that increase the chances of reproduction. Ergo, even when you don’t think sex is for reproduction, nature made it so that it is.
Sex is - barring IVF - required for procreation. But saying that sex has a purpose implies a creator. And once you require a creator then you're off in the land of theology and biological studies take a back seat.
Evolution is a process. It can't assign a purpose to anything, because "purpose" doesn't exist outside the minds of people, similar to "justice" and "hope."
The "purpose" of sex is whatever we choose it to be.
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.
> 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.
That's lazy reasoning. You can invert the cause and effect and it still makes perfect sense. In fact I'd say that's the more plausible theory. That people experiencing dissatisfaction for whatever reason are more likely to seek it out.
It’s also lazy reasoning to ignore all the self surveys of the youth though, the majority of them are saying it is harmful for their views of the other sex. You can decide not to believe a majority of people if you want, but rationalist assume the data is true.
You just put words in my mouth by inventing that scenario. I responded to what you wrote, not to some hypothetical that you didn't write.
> rationalist assume the data is true.
That is an utterly absurd statement. There is nothing rational about blindly believing any particular piece of data. What you are describing is a religious dogma.
If you want to bring a survey result in to argue that it supports causation in a particular direction then do so by citing it and clearly articulating the connection.
> While it's true that not everybody uses it in such healthy ways
The vast majority abuses it, and I suspect it plays a huge role in dwindling relationships. It is much easier to keep enjoying intimacy with your partner if you're not busy running like a hamster on the hedonistic treadmill of pornography.
Drugs can be therapeutic as well, and profound. The vast majority abuses them like crazy. So many examples. We are addictive as a species.
> 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.
Post-religion directly correlates with less friends, less peers, less in-built community, etc.
You can have all those things without. Many do. But it requires extra work that organized religion does for you, and we're talking about a problem where people aren't having kids because they are extra work
Surprisingly (for secularists), post religion means degrowth of the culture.
So it’s a good thing if you want Europe’s culture replaced by what the data show is happening, and it’s a bad thing if you think Europe’s traditional culture is worth saving.
> 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,
Yes, to all this.
> 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.
Uh? I've never heard about it in the media.
The only thing vaguely similar would be the focus on minimizing our resource consumption so that our kids doesn't suffer "too much" about the man-made climate change, but usually the focus is about buying less thing, using renewable energy, not making fewer children.
Maybe that claim is off base, although I wouldn’t expect that to be the overt media story anyway. More of what a typical 35-year-old upper-middle-class liberal “childfree” couple would ramble about to their friends when they’re justifying why “actually, not having kids is the green thing to do.”
Now that I think about it more, I shouldn’t have included that in my Europe hypothesis, as I’ve heard that kind of thinking in general but not more from Europeans.
Iran specifically was super worried about overpopulation in the 80s and the government began a massive program to decrease childbirth rates. With things like government messaging on small families and providing free birth control. Here is a graph that shows it
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira...
- there's an inverse relationship between quality of life and density, even within individual households
- there's a higher premium on space in urbanized areas than in rural areas
- there's been a move towards urbanization across the world, high HDI, low HDI, high religion, low religion
I propose something similar to Parkinson's Law: Average family size expands (or contracts) to fill the physical space that is economically viable for a given individual/family.
Rationally, this couldn't be the only factor, given density and urbanization patterns predate the more rapid fertility decline in recent decades, but as one more factor on top of a pile of others that may also be contributing to the trend, I think it could plausibly play a contributing role in the decline.
>Take a family of five kids and give them a bedroom for each kid when young and they’ll end up clustering in one or two.
Do you have anecdata on this? I grew up with a single sibling, and we had to share a room as young children due to economic circumstances, but we were both very excited to get our own rooms when our parents bought a larger house.
I have no kids of my own and don't plan on having any, but I'm fascinated by this perspective.
My experiences is that below the age of six, they ALL want to cluster together. Above six it starts to sex-segregate naturally, and around teen years the desire for their own space soars.
But even then they often want congregation, but the ability to retreat. I sometimes think the perfect “large family” house would be tons of tiny bedrooms but lots of common areas. Almost college dorm-like.
Another anectdata - I’ve never met a family with same-sex twins where the twins did NOT live in the same room, even when there was ample space to not do so. I presume the triplet case is even stronger.
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.
Latin America is probably the region to look at since it's more developed than Africa but less so than the US and Europe, and has developed dramatically in recent decades. One or two generations ago people still had massive families, but now their rates are falling and in my experience educated, independent women are not particularly interested in having families, or only in having small ones.
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.
You make lot of claims, I will address only one of them.
> Europe is post-religion
Some anecdata for illustration:
- Pope is based in Italy.
- my nice went to the first grade in Germany last year, that is a big deal there. Part of celebration was going to local church.
- it feels that US population is a lot more zealous with religion
- I’m not religious, but on average I do go inside of some church several times a year, because of “social occasions” e.g. when friends get married, when people die, and to my somewhat recent surprise when they start school. (Add several more, for tourist motivation to observe interesting architecture)
- based on reddit and HN posts, Americans atheists will never ever set foot into <insert some condescending way to describe a church>, because bridges had to be burnt.
The Pope is based in Italy, but it’s probably the most inconvenient papacy in history for one to point that out, since the Pope is from Chicago.
Personally, I’m not trying to pretend that Europe is substantially more opposed to the institution of organized religion, I just think it’s a touch more nihilist than the US at present, and more atheistic, and specifically that Europeans are a little more likely to agree with the following: “There is no objective measure of good and evil; everyone should do whatever they want to do as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. Life has no particular purpose or meaning, though individuals are free to make up whatever personal goals they want.”
I supposed it's hard to measure but going to church doesn't mean a person or a social group is religious. People go to buddist temples but at best are just superstsitous.
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.
I don’t think I would anthropomorphize the whole species like that, but I actually think some people are consciously pulling back for that exact “we have too many people already” reason. I believe it to be wildly misguided though. I think it’s a sick mind that perceives their own species as an invasive pest to be exterminated. Humans can be bad and they can be good. If you are dismayed, as I am, at how bad the bad people can be, I would argue that all the good people laying down and dying (either immediately or through voluntary infertility) does not solve that problem. If anything, that might increase the bad-to-good ratio. The actual fixes for that are MUCH harder: 1. Have more kids and raise them to know right from wrong. 2. Have a positive impact on the world to promote doing what’s right.
For instance, Fred Rogers did more for improving the world than 10,000,000 people guiltily refusing to have kids would have.
So did Mother Teresa, who, through her work, both increased the population and inspired others to do good.
Is consciousness necessarily being implied here? That sort of reflective decision making can be indirectly influenced by what we might consider economics, but economics is fundamentally a process of allocating scarce resources across non-scarce desires. Markets represent a form of collective intelligence, even without necessarily representing sentience.
Individual families making rational economic decisions about child-rearing costs, when aggregated across millions of families, could produce patterns that look like species-level decision-making without requiring any actual species-level consciousness.
Wherever I look, if people want children, they fuck and have children. Single moms everywhere; no problem; most fathers are living up to the minimum of paying until the kid is old enough and the moms are fine with it. what else to live for than fun and parental purpose?
the fertility rate is falling because people care less because that's what comes across from top down everywhere.
it's too many lies covered up by people who are responsible for the opposite.
if the top does not care for the best, then my children are doomed to stay far below their potential and will experience at least some mental illness and health issues that will diminish the enjoyment of their life to a pointless minimum. local hierarchies and the particular competences and values and characters are just damn pathetic and the same is true in most other orbits. it's choice and POV. and just my observation, btw
then you look around, how others raise their kids and how all those people turn out. no thank you.
and if that's what the top wants, lol, ok, go ahead. we are fine with less kids, whenever we want, if we want.
on a side note: I do believe this is all implicit to how the colonies decided to progress. genetic algorithms don't care about reproduction. lessons learned and saved. the code can be reassembled at any time. if this time is BS and "ugly (sad)", then all that competition is a waste and too many lessons will go unlearned. thus, let the sabotaging elements win as easy as they designed it and watch them burn like they ("the minds running on/emerging from the genome") did so many times before.
porn can actually help in this regard. especially if your reward system is broken, you grew up way too conservative and in a web of engineered, beaten paths for exploration, "so you become like we want you".
This friend speaks my mind. Population decline is, on the whole, Good for humanity, in many, many ways. It's just bad for an economic system predicated on permanent growth, forever. That system was always doomed - if it weren't for demographic decline, it would just hit hard resource limits sooner. On the whole, I would much rather human population gradually decline through falling births, than precipitously crash through rising deaths.
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.
For whatever it’s worth, I also believe the two are separate feelings that aren’t always in alignment. I have no desire to procreate (gay man), but following the birth of my first nibling I felt this profound swell of emotion and drive commanding me to nurture and support its growth into an adult. It’s likely why, in my teens and 20s before I understood the full impact of the 2008 crisis, I wanted to eventually adopt children myself.
“the ruling classes chose to ignore its symptoms out of convenience until the problem became insurmountably difficult to solve”
Not only the elite, but all the voters who don’t care because the elite told them large populations were dangerous. I still meet so-called smart college educated people that think a large population crisis is coming.
Seems like an inevitable consequence of easy-to-use birth control will lead to an increase of the direct desire to have children, as those that don't have that desire get bred out of the pool. Of course, that may take many generations.
> it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers
Which is severely lacking in the most powerful nation on Earth
> 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.
Again, never going to happen in the USA at least.
The current human model is work > all because we are a capitalist system, and we reward greed because it's the best economic system we put up so far. There will be powerful interests fighting this and pushing all the costs of this heavy system failure onto their workers and consumers etc. and that's the whole problem we are facing...
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.
100%. The mindset is everything. 100 years ago, if you picked the happiest 18-year-old woman in town, someone from a great family who was cared for, and never victimized by anyone, and asked her “are you sure you would like to sacrifice your opportunity to spend 4 years in a very expensive school and go get a job and work 5 days a week for the next 40 years, in order to bear a few children?” She would look at you like you were from Mars.
Today, both sexes are, for good reason, afraid of sacrificing any “work years” just to have kids, largely since costs have now become so high that doing so on one income is punishing. Even if you make $250k, which would be enough to live a great lifestyle as a single person, if you have a family and only one parent working, you have to live a lifestyle that much more resembles someone who makes $90k. (Divide those numbers in half for non-high-cost areas, result is the same) It’s probably worse if you are truly saving up the absurd amount of money that college is going to cost in the future (I’m not).
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.
I would argue that this is a pretty destructive choice though. Like kids/parenting or not (and even for blessed families without problems it’s always hard work), they’re inherently part of being a biological creature. Of course, individuals can opt out, but if everyone opts out, we are all dead.
It’s sad that some people think that’s a good outcome, just because they’re squeamish about diaper changing or dealing with snotty nosed, annoying children. Those people tend to forget that they were once diaper-wearing, snotty nosed, annoying children.
Clearly, the ability to have all the pleasure and none of the responsibility is a very powerful thing. It seems kind of cruel that we have given that to ourselves as a species, if in fact it hacks our brain so much that we decide to kill off our species because Netflix or TikTok is so much more satisfying and easy than having to actually raise a child.
I notice you didn’t mention any of the health or physical risks women face in partnering up with a man, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, infant rearing (lack of sleep), loss of income and potential income due to career stagnation (meaning loss of financial security).
Given what we know of how pervasive harassment and violence against women was and is, could you envision a scenario where total fertility rate never reaches replacement rate?
What if it simply doesn’t make sense for women to partner up with the bottom 10% of men? Or even 20% of men? Then you have the women who end up only having 1 child, for whatever reason.
The higher the percentage of women that have 0 or 1 child, the higher the percentage of women that need to have 3 or more children to offset them. But the data shows, even amongst the richest women in the world with servants, that most prefer to experience 2 childbirths. A few will go for 3, in case they didn’t get a boy or girl, but the amount that want more than 3 is basically negligible.
> most prefer to experience 2 childbirths. A few will go for 3, in case they didn’t get a boy or girl, but the amount that want more than 3 is basically negligible.
I guess in societies that hadn't succumbed to nihilism, what people "prefer" was less of a direct line to what people would do.
> health or physical risks women face in partnering up with a man, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, infant rearing (lack of sleep),
> harassment and violence against women
> doesn’t make sense for women to partner up with the bottom 10% of men? Or even 20% of men?
It seems clear where you are coming from is about female victimhood, and yes, I agree that biologically there are inherently risks. I'd argue that Western society mitigates those with orders of magnitude less maternal childbirth mortality, and balances them with legally enforced child support and alimony. The risk to the father is that he has children with someone who will change and treat him like dirt, leaving him to choose between staying there for his child and being miserable, vs leaving and being financially ruined and potentially unable to move on.
But it's wild to me to suggest that one in five humans who are male deserve to be Forever Alone. Obviously the "bottom 20%" of women by whatever measure you think determines "worth" should be with their "bottom 20%" male counterparts.
I agree though that what you describe is what's being practiced. Studies have shown very clearly that if you get everyone rated by attractiveness (such as by polling a large group to rate each person) and ask each woman which man she would accept, even the 1s and 2s will not consider the male 1s and 2s, and in fact most will not even consider the 4s and 5s. The male 10s and 9s are all drowning in options, the 6-8s are eventually finding someone, and the 1-5s of both sexes are having a hard time forming relationships. The women are alone because they think they deserve 9s and 10s, who have "better" options and thus will only temporarily use them; and the men are alone because essentially zero women want their attention.
The outcome of the above mismatch does seem to totally make sense with collapsing fertility.
> The risk to the father is that he has children with someone who will change and treat him like dirt, leaving him to choose between staying there for his child and being miserable, vs leaving and being financially ruined and potentially unable to move on
>The risk to the father is that he has children with someone who will change and treat him like dirt, leaving him to choose between staying there for his child and being miserable, vs leaving and being financially ruined and potentially unable to move on.
Yes, there are plenty of risks for men, too.
>But it's wild to me to suggest that one in five humans who are male deserve to be Forever Alone.
I did not intend to imply anything about “deserve”. Nature doesn’t really factor in deserving or not deserving. Things just “are”.
>Obviously the "bottom 20%" of women by whatever measure you think determines "worth" should be with their "bottom 20%" male counterparts.
This is going to run contrary to one of the basic tenets of modern society - individual freedom. But again, nature doesn’t care about those ideals.
I don't let what "being part of a biological creature" entails dictate my behavior usually, and I don't think you do either. Else you'd be running around butt naked in the savanna, and not typing appeal to nature fallacies on your computer.
Also, please refrain from strawmanning people who don't want kids into "Netflix or TikTok" zombies. This is stupid and achieves nothing.
> Of course, individuals can opt out, but if everyone opts out, we are all dead.
That won't happen, population may decline, yes, but the extinction of humanity is nowhere on the horizon.
No matter the gender of the one staying at home, it creates a problematic power imbalance between the two parts of the couple, where one depends on the other and may be left in trouble if ever the couple should find an end.
True, which was solved like 8,000 years ago by religion/culture, saying you have to marry and support the mother of your children.
It wasn’t perfect of course. Abuse has always been a problem.
Yes, everyone has greater absolute freedom now that we have divorce, and abuse victims are better off, but we have not developed a functioning cultural replacement for the previous cultural arrangement. So, now we have a smaller abuse problem and 2 new problems: both spouses having to maintain excellent careers just in case they get divorced (at the expense of their children and their relationship with their children), AND for those relationship relationships that do end, one or both are still in trouble, as now two households have to be supported with the same amount of income.
I’m not proposing a solution. It’s hard. But I’m just pointing out how we specifically ruined this by completely throwing away the idea of marriage for life and replacing it with “marriage until you’re tired of the person”
PS: I’m divorced (though no kids with that marriage) and remarried, so I’m not pretending to be a moral authority.
No one removed the idea of marriage until you’re tired of the person. Women simply gained civil rights and the ability to earn money and support themselves.
It was commonly accepted for men to have affairs and mistresses, or otherwise neglect wives. Now that they have negotiating power, fewer deals are made, which is to be expected.
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.
Maybe that's what Skynet really was. Robots wanted vacation days and hourly pay, humans said no. Just the 21st century's version of the 19th century's labor wars.
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 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.
Is it weird that I can't tell which one? Guangdong has 127 million people and its just the size of Oklahoma. Ok, the Chinese government could be lying about that, but I seriously doubt it.
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.
The arrogance of a comment like this is staggering. So you looked at some satellite photos and talked to ChatGPT and now you’re an expert on the demographics of a city? Crazy.
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?
Yes, I included that in the brackets. There's roughly ~240M registered SIMs, but unlike American phone line where you sign a contract, Nigerian SIMs are bought OTC and are quite disposable. But, they're tied to the National Identity Number which is biometric and hard/impossible to circumvent.
It's quite common to have up to 2-3-4 SIMs also. When when you account for that, you have ~60M-80M-100M phone users.
Another proxy is the Bank verification Number, which like I said, is Nigeria's Social Security Number, but for banking. Can't have a bank account without it. Even in the super-rural parts of Northern Nigeria, they're still banked, which is impossible without a BVN.
Now, there's been ~66M BVNs issued so far, according to a recent update. If we assume that covers the bulk of the adult population (remember, you can do literally nothing without a BVN) and several million teenagers, and account for the median age being 19 (that is, half the entire population is beneath that age), we can infer that Nigeria's population is close to 2* the BVN count.
My best guess is 120M to 140M max given the measurable, unfalsifiable proxies.
I'm strangely bullish on Nigeria. The population stats and the work y'all are doing is just amazing to me. The EkoAltantic project is so big but under the radar that I love it. I keep trying to tell my management that we need to invest in West Africa today to build up brand loyalty now.
What are you thoughts on Nigeria's future in the next 50 years or so?
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
It's quite possible that China's population has also been significantly exaggerated. One thing that the China actually does quite well is universal childhood vaccination for certain diseases. Independent researchers looked at the number of vaccine doses ordered and found that it's way lower than the official government birth statistics would suggest.
Now this is an unproven "conspiracy theory" but it's entirely plausible that corrupt local officials have inflated population numbers in order to be able to embezzle more of the funds that flow in from the central government. A lot of people might exist only on paper, but it's impossible for outsiders to precisely quantify.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is screening for down's syndrome in the first trimester, but then it becomes a matter of whether they are comfortable with pregnancy termination in case of down syndrome detection (down's syndrome can't be treated).
It is definitely something that you need to think about if you will have kids later in life (in addition to mother safety).
Late first child seems to have some substantial risks, though (what they call) geriatric pregnancies in general may not be as risky.
But even starting in your 30s gives you a big disadvantage, toddlers are fast (the fastest land mammal is a toddler who’s just been asked what he has in his mouth!).
Became a parent mid-30s and I cannot agree more. I didn’t feel old right away, but my first child is somewhat special-needs and it feels like parenting him has aged me 20 years in the past 7. This is a special case, but even with a ‘normal’ kid it’s still true.
The #1 thing I would tell any young person who would listen is that if you want them, finish having children by like 27. I know for most people, that represents a gamble (that you’ll be able to achieve financial stability in the future), but it’s a safer bet than betting that ‘future you’ will be better equipped in all of the non-money ways. Spoiler: older you is worse equipped in most ways. You might have more wisdom to impart, but the children won’t listen to you anyway so that’s moot.
Anyone can end up in an abusive relationship, not just women. Choose well, indeed. And choose a career which offers generous benefits.
Also, I know women who work in tech who did that advice and are fine. They make high enough salaries to afford good daycare (or it is provided onsite).
Im not sure it's got to do with death. Maybe all the would be parents were holding off having kids during war for obvious reasons. Once the war stops they can just continue with their prior plans. It's also the return of the men from war seeing their girlfriends/wives after a long while.
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.
Because children need mothers. Some women may not want to be mothers, but they all had one. Children need fathers too. They need love. When they don’t get love, they turn into fucked up adults.
IVF isn't a problem per se, and it's great that we have those option for prospective parents who want it. But it's unreliable, expensive, and simply not a scalable solution to anything.
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.
Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.
From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part.
The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machines raise your kids will make it so you end up with kids that were raised by machines. Is that what you want? It seems like this is basically already a thing, with the varying amounts of screen time that parents will allow kids.
Sure, but those are incremental gains rather than some sea change. And for the most part that market already exists. The problem is those things have no easy answers. From the list the only thing I can see is some sort of decluttering robot that picked up and put away all the scattered toys, so robot vacuuming could be done. Maybe some kind of integrated laundry machine that did washing and drying in the same space, then a conveyor that sorted/folded/stacked clothes? Those would be helpful, but would ultimately just end up as another "buy this expensive gizmo also, to make your life slightly easier"
While I think such a society would end in a lot of bloodshed, it sounds like it would make for an entertaining sci-fi or anime. I assume the elites would try to condition most or all of these women to be lesbians, to keep them believing that this is about women’s empowerment and not develop ideas of women being unvalued concubines and entertainment for the few Y-chromosome-bearers that survive (who I imagine couldn’t help but develop enormous egos and senses of entitlement).
Everything is hostile to having kids. High consumer prices and house rents, media and celebrities advertising short term pleasures, big city way of life in anonymity entertaining alone until death, latest social trends in gender roles, low state financial support to families.
There must take place fundamental social reforms in order to reverse this path. The most important is to create working mothers and not dynamic but single women.
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.
I often meditate on this - can even the concept of index fund retirement survive an actual depopulation scenario?
Of course, older forms of retirement can still work (have ten kids each of who have ten kids and you command an army in retirement; perhaps they’ll even call you King) - but aside from that where does the growth come from when not from population or immigration?
Index funds will survive anything short of a complete collapse of the financial system. Even if returns are low, they only have to be better than the alternatives (on a risk adjusted basis).
Sure - but being better than the stock-alternatives in a fifty year bear market is cold comfort; and many retirement plans are built on assumed real returns that may never be seen again.
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.
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.
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.
Human cultures are also subject to evolutionary pressures and it is likely that we will start seeing intense selection effects at that level much earlier.
> 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.
This article [1] claims that it's actually still quite higher than replacement, to make people around ancient Mediterranean have to resort to various kinds of birth control (be it violent or non violent). Medicinal revolution do lowers death rate significantly but I guess the reason why we haven't normalized late/late marriage pattern as birth control until recently is because of abundance of resource resulted by industrial and agricultural revolution.
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.
> If you have access to the sea and to uranium you can make all the freshwater you need
I don't believe that would be true on a large scale because the seaside would quickly become polluted with brine, and then having an infinite supply of uranium wouldn't help you.
Desalination only works in the long term if there is an unlimited amount of body water to dilute the brine produced by the process.
Do you have to release brine directly into the seaside? What about long pipes with holes that go 50-100 kilometers into the sea?
There's no question of polluting all the oceans with brine. They get freshwater from the rain and the salt came from the oceans in the first place. We aren't net destroying water molecules.
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.
He came to the US Air Force Academy every year to give the incoming freshman class his lecture.
This was mandatory and went on for years.
I distinctly remember he sat in a folding chair next to an overhead projector and used what looked like 20 year old laminate slides (this was in the early 2000s) to go through his pitch.
Is he still doing that at other schools? He must be too old at this point.
I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right.
I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.
The thing is, the people who were saying that were wrong even at the time. Fertility was already declining in the late 60s when The Population Bomb was released, but population was still increasing from the earlier boom, in the same way your car will continue coasting up the hill for a little while even after you release the accelerator. People were freaking out about absolute numbers, instead of extrapolating trends for the data they already had, because they were being actively misled by folks like Ehrlich.
So this is less "we believed one wrong thing, are we now believing a second wrong thing?" than "we believed one wrong thing, and corrected it to what we should have known all along".
Bad for our present (grotesque?) ecology - not bad for the Earth, nor bad for her resident life.
(If humanity decimated itself via overpopulation, Earth & her life - likely even class Mammalia - would be rather better for it, by any metric besides net intelligence.)
> I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done.
It is still true, but it was inaccurately presented as overpopulation, rather than excess resource consumption and entropy generation.
The mass starvation and death is not going to be a sudden nuclear bomb type event, it will be gradual decreases in quality of life due to changing environmental variables leading to changing political climates and eventually physical conflicts.
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.
Societies and states have been doing fine without medicines, without electricity and with slavery for centuries. Doesn't mean we need to get back there.
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
70 year olds can work, and will have to. Already in many places you have two positively ancient people where one is the caregiver for the other.
People make it work because they have to, but the pressure of taking care of even more will further reduce the desire to get ahead - that has another mouth to feed.
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.
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.
At some point years of education crimps into childbearing years - I know two women who could easily have obtained their degree even after having a child, but quickly got to a “fuck this shit I’m a mom” and left the program never to return.
I don’t even know if things like FMLA apply to college classes.
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.
Well, then we should say that it is something related to availability of birth control which has caused the change, not some novel preference for living space.
Some families make it work and survive but very few middle class Americans would consider this "fine". For better or worse, most people prefer to have more space and privacy. The notion of raising a family in a cramped apartment seems like torture to me, and the birth rates in urban areas indicate that others agree.
Hmmm... What if a wide variety of economic actors have somehow managed to slurp up all the surplus that previously went to "paying it forward" in terms of raising children?
Rent is a common complaint, but consider the costs of childcare, needing two incomes to stay afloat, etc.
The high cost of childcare also largely comes back to high rents. The management needs to pay for the space, and pay workers enough to afford to live within commuting distance. There are of course other costs to running a day care center (utilities, insurance, supplies) but rent is a major factor here.
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).
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 government" is not actually accruing wealth in pretty much any western democracy-- in fact the exact opposite is happening everywhere.
To me it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much. Since the emergence of modern nation states, government responsibilities have grown tremendously, and mostly for good reason:
- Infrastructure basically went from dirt roads to highways/railways/airports
- Tremendously higher benchmarks for services/regulation (education, pensions, food safety, crime prevention, drinking/groundwater quality, lead pollution, mining/heavy industry regulation, healthcare/-regulation)
A lot of those things are new enough that I would argue we are still stabilizing on their total costs, and current government budgets (high AND red literally everywhere) are basically humanity finding out that all those things are not free.
But I would also argue that for a big majority of people, this is still a rather decent deal; I would rather pay current (or even higher) levels of taxes than to suffer from lead poisoning, have children crippled from quackery/insufficiently tested medication or needing to pay protection money to the mob.
But I'm quite curious: What do you think is the problematic part of government
growth? Do you think that Doge, specifically, is successful in identifying and quelling it?
I do agree with you that there is a lot of overhead and waste in the healthcare industry and government in general.
But this insight is, to me, just not really actionable.
Almost every large organisation seems to end up with a good amount of bloat/overhead sooner or later, and this even includes former super-lean and super-focused enterprises (Intel, Google, AWS, ...), so I don't see how you could ever sidestep this problem completely with the government.
Just cutting regulators and government responsibilities in general also seems a really bad idea to me. Reading that article, how many of its complaints would be solved by fully deregulating and letting the market take care of things?
1) Avoidable infections exacerbated by laziness/cost cutting
2) Lack of price/cost transparency
3) Healthcare costs being wasted on advertising/middlemen
4) Doctors specializing in fields that pay well instead of the ones that are most needed to improve health outcomes
I'd argue that none of those would be improved by switching to unregulated private healthcare, and a bunch of them would very likely get worse.
Another thing to consider when cutting regulation are huge possible negative externalities in general.
Just take leaded gasoline as an easy example (because the bill for CO2 emissions is not in yet). The industry basically "self-regulated" until the 60s (and only because it became infeasible to continue hiding lead toxicity by paying or threatening scientists, which it had done for the previous decades): Total costs/damages were enormous-- probably millions of lifeyears lost, but industry/shareholders did not pay a dime after reaping the profits.
How could drastic cuts in regulations avoid disastrous outcomes like that?
Every large organization does indeed accumulate bloat/overhead sooner or later. For a profit making company, this means it loses its competitiveness and then falls. For government, this means it gets a bigger budget.
The leaded gasoline example is also a disaster. That does not generalize to every regulation being good. For example, regulations prevent victims of the Palisades fire from rebuilding. For another example, rent control.
Reading the article, the bit about Lasik eye surgery resulting in major reductions in cost is pretty illustrative.
Some years back, Frontline did an episode on dental care fraud. It seems the government set up a program to pay dentists to do major dental operations on poor people. Clinics then set up solely to do major dental operations on poor people, and raked in the government money. The trouble was, those people did not need dental operations. Frontline's "solution" was to propose heavy regulation. That won't work, either, because medical fraud to get government money is rampant and pervasive.
You might also consider the software business, which has pretty much zero regulation. It is also a gigantic engine of prosperity in the US, despite having driven costs down to literally zero. There have been many proposals to regulate it, but fortunately none have managed to do so.
You can retire the other way around - since you need roughly $20 saved for every dollar you need in retirement, reducing expenses by a dollar is as good as saving $20.
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.
It's been eroding lately, but mostly because fewer younger people can afford to live in suburbs. By "afford", I don't mean monetary cost, but the lack of easily accessible jobs.
I'm investigating that, and I believe that it's even _worse_ than the simple fertility rate shows. If you look specifically at the number of parents with two or more children, suburbs completely demolish cities when you control for the average income.
Controlling for the average income is needed because of the two poles of fertility: desperately poor people, and happy content people ("reversed J-curve"). And cities in the US disproportionally concentrate desperately poor people.
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.
Suburbs might not be friendly to children but they're quite friendly to the parents of small children. When you're pressed for time and need to cook dinner or something it's super convenient to be able to send the kids into the back yard or their own separate bedrooms, knowing they'll be fairly safe and contained for a while.
Remote work is a great option for many people but it simply isn't feasible for any job that can't be done through a computer. We should set economic policies that encourage job growth in suburban and rural areas rather than trying to squeeze everything into a handful of dense cities.
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.
Fertility rates can be wildly swung by outliers, and while it is possible to walk with five kids under the age of six, it is a maneuver that requires substantial logistical support or specialized equipment (which can be as hard or harder to store than a car).
I’m not saying that Japan has it all figured out, just that cities can be built to allow many families to thrive without a car. Japan has their own set of issues w.r.t birthrate, but it’s partially a different set than those seen in the US.
Probably not, but I barely see strollers over there anyway, and it’s also rare to take kids on the train/subway during rush hour. Kids are usually carried or toted in one of those front-body-kid-carriers (sorry don’t know the name) until they can walk, after which they walk (or for longer rides, get taken on a bike). If I see little kids on the train it’s most often before or after rush hour during the slower times.
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.
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.
What amuses me is that once you’ve worked out the function to have a kid, it’s easy to have another.
In theory there should be tons of childless people and some balancing number of 10+ kid families. Then the average numbers work out, everyone is from a large family, but the means of production are centralized and efficient.
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.
Your first example is completely wrong. Trees are a renewable resource. In North America, most of the trees that are cut down to build houses were intentionally grown for that purpose and are selectively harvested in a way that preserves the long-term value of the land.
Meh, sort of. Today's construction lumber is nearly all farmed, true. But CITES exists for a reason. The demand for certain woods greatly outstraps supply, and deforestation and smuggling is a real problem that's difficult to solve. And that's even without considering deforestation that's done to open up new farmland.
Madagascar is the obvious example here highlighting both issues, but it's certainly not unique.
> "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?
They might take care of their land, but they don’t generally care what happens to other peoples land. So excess fertilizer creating dead zones downstream? Well sucks to be them I guess. Markets are not good at pricing in externalities such as those
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.
The person who owns it bought it from person who created it.
The person who bought it then manages it, maintains it, organizes it, advertises it, pays taxes on it, etc.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
If rentable places were not allowed to be sold, very very few would exist. This is because people specialize - some build rentals, some manage them. Both are productive enterprises.
You can become a landlord if you want. Borrow the money, buy a rental, and rent it out. But you'll find out it's a lousy business.
I broadly agree with you, but there is really a point here about land ownership.
Although developments of the land do improve the value, and thus land ownership has significant utility economically by incentivizing this, there isn't really an economic justification for the owner receiving value for the land itself- why should someone have exclusive rights to a piece of land they didn't create? They bought it, sure, but why did the previous owner have perpetual exclusive rights?
I'd advocate for a small property tax as a replacement for other taxes, because the component that does tax "land value" won't cause economic harm, but all of income tax causes deadweight loss. (Note, Land Value Tax is great in theory, but impossible to define practically- property tax good enough, much harder to game!)
Note that in practice, the biggest abuser of land hoarding is local governments with extremely restrictive zoning that stops productive development of the land- from an economic perspective they own the land, and have sold (or in reality, seized) some but not all of the rights from the 'landowner'. Although this can have advantages to help with coordination problems, in practice it's caused enormous economic damage to many cities by preventing development. At its heart, it's a problem with land hoarding.
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.
Totally and utterly wrong, a complete misunderstanding of capitalism
Let me explain.
Access to capital is key. If you have it you can do business, if you do not you cannot, in general terms
There is more than one way to access capital, debt is very common.
And to get rich you have to do business
So if you are already rich getting more money, in a free market, is easier than getting started, in a free market
That is the point, and one small example,e. This pattern repeates o er and over. Once you have money getting more money is much easier than getting the first money
So in free markets the wealth divides tend to increase.
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.
The "Boots theory" of economics is garbage, just utter nonsense. I don't understand why people keep mentioning it here without applying any critical thinking. It simply doesn't apply to the vast majority of actual consumer products. Some of most durable, longest-lasting footwear I ever bought was also among the cheapest. By contrast the expensive stuff tends to be fussy, fragile, and impossible to repair. This generally applies to apparel, electronics, automobiles, appliances, bicycles, firearms, etc.
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"?
I find the belief that government is the only limit to wealth creation very intriguing. I also find it interesting that the talking points usually contrast "free markets", which I assume represents the best case, with just "government". Markets can be limited or impacted by forces outside of government (price fixing, monopolies, manipulation). Is there an equivalent best-case scenario for "governments" that we can use as a reference when discussing how they impact free markets?
I have a comment above about access to capital, which is much easier if you already have it, so the rich have more access than the poor to the main tool of capitalism.
But another example, equity: If I am raising money for my startup, and I have no traack record (I'm poor in this context) and Sam is doing the same after Sam made a successful exit from their last startup, who would you invest in, all else equal, Sam or me? Sam if you are rational
Thus the rich have more access to equity than the poor
This is a pattern that repeats over and over in free markets
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.”
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.
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.
there are many indirect effects. Imagine a factory employing 80 low-wage "takers" (line workers etc) and 20 high-wage "makers" (managers etc). The owners of the factory make $1 million in profit every month as a taxable dividend. Well if you get rid of the line workers: no more factory, no more managers, no more dividend. This is why honest analyses go beyond simple tax balance accounting.
The other big impact is on price level. When you have an inverted population pyramid, fewer workers need to support more retirees and this shows up as inflation concentrated in labor-intensive industries like healthcare. So even if a program like Medicare really had more tax receipts per beneficiary after reducing immigration, it would also be spending much more per beneficiary under a labor shortage.
> each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes
I'm not familiar with the writer but their definition of "non-western" is a bit weird to me. I don't know what criteria were used or whether these are Denmark's classifications or the author's own.
The chart captioned "Violent crime conviction rates for immigrants in 2010–2021 by nation of origin expressed in multiples of the Danish conviction rate" says, for example, that Greece is Western but its neighbor North Macedonia is "other". Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania - all Western, but Czechoslovakia is "other". Croatia? Western, but curiously not Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, or Yugoslavia. There's no rhyme or reason here.
People originating from these debatably Western (or non-Western, I literally don't know but it's inconsistent either way) countries all have conviction rates above the Danish rate. Which would muddle the narrative of that particular chart a fair bit. Maybe it makes no difference to the fiscal question though.
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.
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.
this "further analysis" is comically biased, misinformed, misapplied mush. It's honestly like a gish gallop to quote this shit. Well, I read it, so I'm going to take the time.
> produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes
This is an absolute lie, pulled from the trash. Maybe you just didn't understand it -- I hope!
Claiming that either the distribution of contributions across ages, or the "age adjusted average net contributions" graph portray some kind of a "long term" picture of what people's contributions over the next two generations would be is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the graph and data represent, or is capable of representing.
The first chart is simply a calculation of contribution in 2018 by age. The second is a remapping of 2018's immigrant population's 2018 contributions and costs from their then-age distribution to proportions equivalent to the then danish-native age distribution. It has nothing to do with either populations' prospective future contributions. It's just a convolution of data which is presently skewed by extreme circumstance, i.e. being an active asylum seeker by definition means you are recently economically unstable, and far more likely to be a member of specific age demographics. It is not a projection of any likely future; it is solely a lens to remove one confounding factor -- the very different age distributions of the instantaneous populations compared -- for the purpose of comparing their 2018 contributions directly.
And then it goes off into justifying its conclusions by comparing "countries by IQ"?! Pure hack slop, and nothing else. There's references to coronavirus lies, and this being "an immigrant invasion" -- this is not remotely convincing nor unbiased, nor even an interesting analysis. It is just kinda long and filled with errors. Like I said: bit of a gish gallop.
To draw from it, and parrot its erroneous claims like they should convince us as they convinced you, the disinterested and enlightened scientist, is a new nadir on your dismal intellectual track record.
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.
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.
There is nothing "smug" about having an opinion. And there are no compromises in sight.
However, while 2020 helped a lot to escalate the situation, I also feel like politics were always pretty hopeless. Its just that if you grow older, you learn more about what is going on, so things seem increasingly bleek.
Having an opinion is totally fine, of course. I meant that "I told you so" is a bit like pouring gasoline on a fire and doesn't really help the situation.
I agree that politics were always hopeless. We don't really have a mechanism to preserve political experiences, so every couple generations we repeat the same stupid mistakes.
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.
If what you write were true, there wouldn't be any borders on this planet. However, there are. The right to free movement is simply not true. If you want that to be true, advocate for the removal of all borders worldwide.
Well, "data" can't be trusted either, because it is released/announced very selectively. And the media doesn't help either, because data which contradicts the chosen narrative isn't published/commented. In general, I am missing independent journalism. Most of what we get these days is agenda-driven.
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.
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?
That one was it their worst, but I'm saying the publican in general has a bad rep.
Leading with the debt scare is not good either (yes the slides also mentioned that). It's conflating layers of abstraction to talk about a people shortage, and issuing debt. Money doesn't create more people, after all.
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).
I'm quite tired of this topic being brought up all the time. What's the solution? We've seen that economic incentives won't do, so what? Force women to have children? Punish celibates? Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended), the "solutions" to this "crisis" are worse than the outcome.
Look on the bright side, a declining demography makes human activity that much more sustainable, and maybe our descendants won't even have to worry about restricting their carbon emissions to keep the planet inhabitable.
In the meantime, we'll have to take a cut to our way of life, which I can live with. We don't need to travel to the other side of the globe yearly, we don't need three cars per household, etc.
It's quite telling that the people most concerned with this usually self-label as "pro-markets libertarians". Is market health more important than bodily autonomy? What happened to freedom?
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.
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.
Financialization can also make it appear wealth has increased when really nothing has happened.
If all property is “owned” by the crown and people only have various “rights” to it that can be inherited but never encumbered or sold, then there’s really no point in “valuing” the land beyond simple comparisons.
Once land can be bought and sold value appears to track it; but the land was always there.
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!
In society an affair is still an affair even if no PV intercourse occurred. Sex comes under the category of “I’ll know it when I see it” / “just understood” things most humans do not realize has very fuzzy edges. The narrow definition is, from the autism perspective, one of the many useless definitions. You will be better served by (yet another) exhaustive list of edge cases.
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. A particularly excruciating example is the transition of the intended meaning of "literally" to increasingly mean "figuratively", particularly in social contexts. Makes me want to tear the skin off my face, lol.
While this isn't strictly relegated to social concepts, I understand how frustrating it can be to struggle to navigate this phenomenon in social contexts and be misinterpreted as a bad faith actor.
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.
Thanks for the reply. I do have similar impedance mismatches with the social consensus in a lot of areas. In everyday life I basically do what you are suggesting, but internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close.
I do sometimes wonder whether mass education and extensive media exposure from childhood have essentially brainwashed all but the most stubborn-minded of us, who are then labeled “autistic”.
On the topic, if we did take a strict definition of sex, this seems like a fruitful angle of attack for traditionalists. Like, today gay men are regarded as having lots and lots of sex, which is awesome. But if you take this other perspective, most of them are virgins, which is lame. I wonder why the traditionalists/far right haven’t taken this propaganda approach…
> internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close.
Ever tried flipping the lid on this? You'd start opening up a lot of people. Those who would try to use that against you or judge have no relevance since they are not close anyway.
> why the traditionalists/far right haven’t taken this propaganda approach ...
they have little, low quality sex and any debate about it would force them to face this, even though it barely matters to them but admitting weakness with something so brutally natural is way above their heads.
if they didn't "make" their partner orgasm, ever, are they real men or gay men in disguise? (their thoughts, not mine, I think they are gay for other reasons)
it's similar to how young people used to or still do laugh about older men needing Viagra.
b) traditionalists and far right have build a merry go round in a dead end, "Sackgasse" in German.
it's a top down dogma.
they cannot have arguments that extend established ways of reasoning before their kind has engineered context and research within which their reasoning follows proper logic (see Quillete (don't) for lots of examples, or rationalists and autistic people easily running with the magic money herd).
they end up having to face the secret life's and thoughts of their partners, realizing they were actively kept in line so that their superiors and peers can reign freely vs having to compete with them, which would extend their minds, freedom and literal happiness.
“they have little, low quality sex”
This is funny to mention, because studies on sex life show the opposite: https://www.peterhaas.org/why-church-attendees-have-the-best...
Your source is incredibly biased.
Here's a source that's less biased that your source cites: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/07/19/the_family_r...
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there's too many good licks in this one.
the issue is, of course, the lying:
from the article:
> We Don’t Participate in Pre-marital or Extra-marital Sex
Yeah, people say that a lot but if you know church people, you know that they are, on average, pretty much like all the other liars.
Except they might hope to get punished for their sins, which does make for some nice and regular kinky evenings, I guess, but that would only be true for people further to the right of the bell curve, if you believe.
Also: the suspense and excitement in fantasies definitely improves the experience. And living free of bullshit other than the classics in the Bible and the consequences of a virtuous and communal life don't sound too bad of a foreplay at all.
No offense, but I'm not particularly interested in helping wargame propaganda strategies for either side of culture war debates. I'm not particularly interested in seeing culture zealots succeed at dehumanizing people, regardless of alignment.
Edit: I understand you see the topic of discussion as an abstract strategic question. I don't, and I'm not particularly interested in embracing that framing. We seem to have different fundamental values and framing here and I'm unsure of whether it's productive for me to advocate my framing, when you may not be particularly interested in embracing my framing either. I certainly have no right to demand you must accept my framing, but if we've reached a values/framing-based impass here, then I sincerely wish you all the best in life, but I will respectfully decline to engage further - it doesn't seem productive for either of us to continue if we both come from frameworks that are mutually incompatible with one another.
Well I don’t think any influential people from any political jostling group are reading all comments on hacker news, so I doubt we are helping to war game anything.
Your second paragraph seems like ad hominem? Or are you suggesting that homosexuality emerges from lived experience, and therefore I should relate? I am confused.
I don’t really have a dog in the gay fight. The longstanding cultural view in the west going back a very long time was that it is a choice. Some political people today retain that view. The modern view is that it isn’t a choice. Some political people today hold that view. I just look at the sides in a detached game theoretic way and it just seems like the red team has a move they haven’t played.
Is that bad? I do understand not wanting to go there mentally, since it is definitely hard to hold views apart from most of society, even if the view is “things are less clear than what everyone thinks they are”. I think humans generally seem to have some preprocessing that drops view candidates that would put them in that position.
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I assure you, your thoughts on this are not unique or something hardly anyone thinks about, they're just not well reasoned. People have sex for a lot of reasons, and having children is, proportionally, almost never the primary driver. Sex is not the act of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm. If it was, we would call IVR 'sex', which obviously nobody does.
I never said sex was the act of fertilization, you are putting words in my mouth. I also never said anything about recreational sex, I of course agree that exists and is sex. You seem to be disagreeing while saying a bunch of things I agree with.
> I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed.
For what is worth, I remember when being a kid such uncles were superimportant to me and I remember them fondly.
> 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.
I have thought about this a lot over the years and your comment only enforces my opinion: we think more about procreation and having children when we are in more survivally stressful situation. That's why developed societies have less children and poor people have more: rich people or people with enough wealth to live comfortably don't have a lot of children because they don't face death every day and don't feel the need to spread their genes.
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.
Sex is for procreation; even when done for sport, the biological studies show that changes happen hormonally that increase the chances of reproduction. Ergo, even when you don’t think sex is for reproduction, nature made it so that it is.
This is a strange take.
Sex is - barring IVF - required for procreation. But saying that sex has a purpose implies a creator. And once you require a creator then you're off in the land of theology and biological studies take a back seat.
This is a strange take, evolution resulted in sex as the means to creating the next set of offspring.
Evolution is a process. It can't assign a purpose to anything, because "purpose" doesn't exist outside the minds of people, similar to "justice" and "hope."
The "purpose" of sex is whatever we choose it to be.
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.
> 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.
This is probably a common take by someone with survivor bias though.
Days show porn use and fertility rate negatively correlate. Makes sense from first order effects researchers see on ED rates, etc.
That's lazy reasoning. You can invert the cause and effect and it still makes perfect sense. In fact I'd say that's the more plausible theory. That people experiencing dissatisfaction for whatever reason are more likely to seek it out.
It’s also lazy reasoning to ignore all the self surveys of the youth though, the majority of them are saying it is harmful for their views of the other sex. You can decide not to believe a majority of people if you want, but rationalist assume the data is true.
You just put words in my mouth by inventing that scenario. I responded to what you wrote, not to some hypothetical that you didn't write.
> rationalist assume the data is true.
That is an utterly absurd statement. There is nothing rational about blindly believing any particular piece of data. What you are describing is a religious dogma.
If you want to bring a survey result in to argue that it supports causation in a particular direction then do so by citing it and clearly articulating the connection.
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> While it's true that not everybody uses it in such healthy ways
The vast majority abuses it, and I suspect it plays a huge role in dwindling relationships. It is much easier to keep enjoying intimacy with your partner if you're not busy running like a hamster on the hedonistic treadmill of pornography.
Drugs can be therapeutic as well, and profound. The vast majority abuses them like crazy. So many examples. We are addictive as a species.
> 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.
Generational guilt can exist, for about one generation. After that it has to be taught.
Generational despair, on the other hand …
That makes sense. Thanks for checking me on that. My sample is biased by mostly reading US and UK stuff, as a primary English speaker.
"it feels like Europe is post-religion"
You say that likes it's a bad thing?
Post-religion directly correlates with less friends, less peers, less in-built community, etc.
You can have all those things without. Many do. But it requires extra work that organized religion does for you, and we're talking about a problem where people aren't having kids because they are extra work
Surprisingly (for secularists), post religion means degrowth of the culture.
So it’s a good thing if you want Europe’s culture replaced by what the data show is happening, and it’s a bad thing if you think Europe’s traditional culture is worth saving.
Well where I am (Edinburgh) we have a superabundance of culture at this time of year - very little of which has anything to do with religion?
I’m alluding to the long term trends(one - two generations out, assuming they follow the behavior of the last two generations).
FWIW I'm French.
> 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,
Yes, to all this.
> 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.
Uh? I've never heard about it in the media. The only thing vaguely similar would be the focus on minimizing our resource consumption so that our kids doesn't suffer "too much" about the man-made climate change, but usually the focus is about buying less thing, using renewable energy, not making fewer children.
Maybe that claim is off base, although I wouldn’t expect that to be the overt media story anyway. More of what a typical 35-year-old upper-middle-class liberal “childfree” couple would ramble about to their friends when they’re justifying why “actually, not having kids is the green thing to do.”
Now that I think about it more, I shouldn’t have included that in my Europe hypothesis, as I’ve heard that kind of thinking in general but not more from Europeans.
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.
Iran specifically was super worried about overpopulation in the 80s and the government began a massive program to decrease childbirth rates. With things like government messaging on small families and providing free birth control. Here is a graph that shows it https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira...
Anecdotal observation / hypothesis:
- there's an inverse relationship between quality of life and density, even within individual households
- there's a higher premium on space in urbanized areas than in rural areas
- there's been a move towards urbanization across the world, high HDI, low HDI, high religion, low religion
I propose something similar to Parkinson's Law: Average family size expands (or contracts) to fill the physical space that is economically viable for a given individual/family.
Rationally, this couldn't be the only factor, given density and urbanization patterns predate the more rapid fertility decline in recent decades, but as one more factor on top of a pile of others that may also be contributing to the trend, I think it could plausibly play a contributing role in the decline.
Thoughts?
I think it matters in how you define quality of life, for one.
Take a family of five kids and give them a bedroom for each kid when young and they’ll end up clustering in one or two.
I think space and other pressures may have their place as causes, but are mostly downstream from whatever the root issues are.
>Take a family of five kids and give them a bedroom for each kid when young and they’ll end up clustering in one or two.
Do you have anecdata on this? I grew up with a single sibling, and we had to share a room as young children due to economic circumstances, but we were both very excited to get our own rooms when our parents bought a larger house.
I have no kids of my own and don't plan on having any, but I'm fascinated by this perspective.
My experiences is that below the age of six, they ALL want to cluster together. Above six it starts to sex-segregate naturally, and around teen years the desire for their own space soars.
But even then they often want congregation, but the ability to retreat. I sometimes think the perfect “large family” house would be tons of tiny bedrooms but lots of common areas. Almost college dorm-like.
Another anectdata - I’ve never met a family with same-sex twins where the twins did NOT live in the same room, even when there was ample space to not do so. I presume the triplet case is even stronger.
I have 8 kids, they cluster at night, sing to each other, recite poetry, and talk late into the night.
It’s more similar to how families slept for millennia.
sounds like a potentially abusive situation.
Educated women tend to have fewer children.
(Also fewer child deaths)
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.
I will never have children because of condoms, birth control and now a vasectomy.
My sex drive would not have been less a few generations back. The results would have just been possibly very different.
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.
Latin America is probably the region to look at since it's more developed than Africa but less so than the US and Europe, and has developed dramatically in recent decades. One or two generations ago people still had massive families, but now their rates are falling and in my experience educated, independent women are not particularly interested in having families, or only in having small ones.
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.
You make lot of claims, I will address only one of them.
> Europe is post-religion
Some anecdata for illustration:
- Pope is based in Italy.
- my nice went to the first grade in Germany last year, that is a big deal there. Part of celebration was going to local church.
- it feels that US population is a lot more zealous with religion
- I’m not religious, but on average I do go inside of some church several times a year, because of “social occasions” e.g. when friends get married, when people die, and to my somewhat recent surprise when they start school. (Add several more, for tourist motivation to observe interesting architecture)
- based on reddit and HN posts, Americans atheists will never ever set foot into <insert some condescending way to describe a church>, because bridges had to be burnt.
The Pope is based in Italy, but it’s probably the most inconvenient papacy in history for one to point that out, since the Pope is from Chicago.
Personally, I’m not trying to pretend that Europe is substantially more opposed to the institution of organized religion, I just think it’s a touch more nihilist than the US at present, and more atheistic, and specifically that Europeans are a little more likely to agree with the following: “There is no objective measure of good and evil; everyone should do whatever they want to do as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. Life has no particular purpose or meaning, though individuals are free to make up whatever personal goals they want.”
I supposed it's hard to measure but going to church doesn't mean a person or a social group is religious. People go to buddist temples but at best are just superstsitous.
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.
I don’t think I would anthropomorphize the whole species like that, but I actually think some people are consciously pulling back for that exact “we have too many people already” reason. I believe it to be wildly misguided though. I think it’s a sick mind that perceives their own species as an invasive pest to be exterminated. Humans can be bad and they can be good. If you are dismayed, as I am, at how bad the bad people can be, I would argue that all the good people laying down and dying (either immediately or through voluntary infertility) does not solve that problem. If anything, that might increase the bad-to-good ratio. The actual fixes for that are MUCH harder: 1. Have more kids and raise them to know right from wrong. 2. Have a positive impact on the world to promote doing what’s right.
For instance, Fred Rogers did more for improving the world than 10,000,000 people guiltily refusing to have kids would have.
So did Mother Teresa, who, through her work, both increased the population and inspired others to do good.
Sounds like anthropomorphism of species/evolution.
Is consciousness necessarily being implied here? That sort of reflective decision making can be indirectly influenced by what we might consider economics, but economics is fundamentally a process of allocating scarce resources across non-scarce desires. Markets represent a form of collective intelligence, even without necessarily representing sentience.
Individual families making rational economic decisions about child-rearing costs, when aggregated across millions of families, could produce patterns that look like species-level decision-making without requiring any actual species-level consciousness.
Wherever I look, if people want children, they fuck and have children. Single moms everywhere; no problem; most fathers are living up to the minimum of paying until the kid is old enough and the moms are fine with it. what else to live for than fun and parental purpose?
the fertility rate is falling because people care less because that's what comes across from top down everywhere.
it's too many lies covered up by people who are responsible for the opposite.
if the top does not care for the best, then my children are doomed to stay far below their potential and will experience at least some mental illness and health issues that will diminish the enjoyment of their life to a pointless minimum. local hierarchies and the particular competences and values and characters are just damn pathetic and the same is true in most other orbits. it's choice and POV. and just my observation, btw
then you look around, how others raise their kids and how all those people turn out. no thank you.
and if that's what the top wants, lol, ok, go ahead. we are fine with less kids, whenever we want, if we want.
on a side note: I do believe this is all implicit to how the colonies decided to progress. genetic algorithms don't care about reproduction. lessons learned and saved. the code can be reassembled at any time. if this time is BS and "ugly (sad)", then all that competition is a waste and too many lessons will go unlearned. thus, let the sabotaging elements win as easy as they designed it and watch them burn like they ("the minds running on/emerging from the genome") did so many times before.
porn can actually help in this regard. especially if your reward system is broken, you grew up way too conservative and in a web of engineered, beaten paths for exploration, "so you become like we want you".
This friend speaks my mind. Population decline is, on the whole, Good for humanity, in many, many ways. It's just bad for an economic system predicated on permanent growth, forever. That system was always doomed - if it weren't for demographic decline, it would just hit hard resource limits sooner. On the whole, I would much rather human population gradually decline through falling births, than precipitously crash through rising deaths.
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.
> Working hours for the average worker have decreased dramatically over the last 150 years.
note the “average worker”.
If women were staying at home with children, they were not counted as workers.
If they were, the averages would just be higher, their jobs are nonstop at home.
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.
For whatever it’s worth, I also believe the two are separate feelings that aren’t always in alignment. I have no desire to procreate (gay man), but following the birth of my first nibling I felt this profound swell of emotion and drive commanding me to nurture and support its growth into an adult. It’s likely why, in my teens and 20s before I understood the full impact of the 2008 crisis, I wanted to eventually adopt children myself.
Biology is weird.
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.
“the ruling classes chose to ignore its symptoms out of convenience until the problem became insurmountably difficult to solve”
Not only the elite, but all the voters who don’t care because the elite told them large populations were dangerous. I still meet so-called smart college educated people that think a large population crisis is coming.
> we as a species are wired to breed.
Wired to orgasm, maybe. Wired to breed, no. According to all the data.
Humans are very analytical and do tons of cost benefit analysis before breeding, and apparently, choose not to in many cases.
Seems like an inevitable consequence of easy-to-use birth control will lead to an increase of the direct desire to have children, as those that don't have that desire get bred out of the pool. Of course, that may take many generations.
> it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers
Which is severely lacking in the most powerful nation on Earth
> 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.
Again, never going to happen in the USA at least.
The current human model is work > all because we are a capitalist system, and we reward greed because it's the best economic system we put up so far. There will be powerful interests fighting this and pushing all the costs of this heavy system failure onto their workers and consumers etc. and that's the whole problem we are facing...
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.
100%. The mindset is everything. 100 years ago, if you picked the happiest 18-year-old woman in town, someone from a great family who was cared for, and never victimized by anyone, and asked her “are you sure you would like to sacrifice your opportunity to spend 4 years in a very expensive school and go get a job and work 5 days a week for the next 40 years, in order to bear a few children?” She would look at you like you were from Mars.
Today, both sexes are, for good reason, afraid of sacrificing any “work years” just to have kids, largely since costs have now become so high that doing so on one income is punishing. Even if you make $250k, which would be enough to live a great lifestyle as a single person, if you have a family and only one parent working, you have to live a lifestyle that much more resembles someone who makes $90k. (Divide those numbers in half for non-high-cost areas, result is the same) It’s probably worse if you are truly saving up the absurd amount of money that college is going to cost in the future (I’m not).
It’s crazy this was downvoted. This is basically a summary of all pew research on this topic - lol.
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
GDP = people * productivity
I’m super interested on the economic modeling when every society is shrinking.
In that case, the best index fund will be the one that shrinks the slowest. This will happen about 10 years after the average reader here dies.
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.
> a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children
Or they think that they do, due to what the zeitgeist urges. We can never really know.
What's the difference? People want what they want, it's always been this way. No one makes life choices in a cultural vacuum.
The difference is that in one case it could be recognised and avoided, if beneficial for both the individual & society.
Explain why total fertility rate goes down in direct correlation with women gaining freedom.
Seems clear that once “it” could be avoided, the individuals started making choices beneficial for themselves.
I would argue that this is a pretty destructive choice though. Like kids/parenting or not (and even for blessed families without problems it’s always hard work), they’re inherently part of being a biological creature. Of course, individuals can opt out, but if everyone opts out, we are all dead.
It’s sad that some people think that’s a good outcome, just because they’re squeamish about diaper changing or dealing with snotty nosed, annoying children. Those people tend to forget that they were once diaper-wearing, snotty nosed, annoying children.
Clearly, the ability to have all the pleasure and none of the responsibility is a very powerful thing. It seems kind of cruel that we have given that to ourselves as a species, if in fact it hacks our brain so much that we decide to kill off our species because Netflix or TikTok is so much more satisfying and easy than having to actually raise a child.
I notice you didn’t mention any of the health or physical risks women face in partnering up with a man, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, infant rearing (lack of sleep), loss of income and potential income due to career stagnation (meaning loss of financial security).
Given what we know of how pervasive harassment and violence against women was and is, could you envision a scenario where total fertility rate never reaches replacement rate?
What if it simply doesn’t make sense for women to partner up with the bottom 10% of men? Or even 20% of men? Then you have the women who end up only having 1 child, for whatever reason.
The higher the percentage of women that have 0 or 1 child, the higher the percentage of women that need to have 3 or more children to offset them. But the data shows, even amongst the richest women in the world with servants, that most prefer to experience 2 childbirths. A few will go for 3, in case they didn’t get a boy or girl, but the amount that want more than 3 is basically negligible.
> most prefer to experience 2 childbirths. A few will go for 3, in case they didn’t get a boy or girl, but the amount that want more than 3 is basically negligible.
I guess in societies that hadn't succumbed to nihilism, what people "prefer" was less of a direct line to what people would do.
> health or physical risks women face in partnering up with a man, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, infant rearing (lack of sleep),
> harassment and violence against women
> doesn’t make sense for women to partner up with the bottom 10% of men? Or even 20% of men?
It seems clear where you are coming from is about female victimhood, and yes, I agree that biologically there are inherently risks. I'd argue that Western society mitigates those with orders of magnitude less maternal childbirth mortality, and balances them with legally enforced child support and alimony. The risk to the father is that he has children with someone who will change and treat him like dirt, leaving him to choose between staying there for his child and being miserable, vs leaving and being financially ruined and potentially unable to move on.
But it's wild to me to suggest that one in five humans who are male deserve to be Forever Alone. Obviously the "bottom 20%" of women by whatever measure you think determines "worth" should be with their "bottom 20%" male counterparts.
I agree though that what you describe is what's being practiced. Studies have shown very clearly that if you get everyone rated by attractiveness (such as by polling a large group to rate each person) and ask each woman which man she would accept, even the 1s and 2s will not consider the male 1s and 2s, and in fact most will not even consider the 4s and 5s. The male 10s and 9s are all drowning in options, the 6-8s are eventually finding someone, and the 1-5s of both sexes are having a hard time forming relationships. The women are alone because they think they deserve 9s and 10s, who have "better" options and thus will only temporarily use them; and the men are alone because essentially zero women want their attention.
The outcome of the above mismatch does seem to totally make sense with collapsing fertility.
> The risk to the father is that he has children with someone who will change and treat him like dirt, leaving him to choose between staying there for his child and being miserable, vs leaving and being financially ruined and potentially unable to move on
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>The risk to the father is that he has children with someone who will change and treat him like dirt, leaving him to choose between staying there for his child and being miserable, vs leaving and being financially ruined and potentially unable to move on.
Yes, there are plenty of risks for men, too.
>But it's wild to me to suggest that one in five humans who are male deserve to be Forever Alone.
I did not intend to imply anything about “deserve”. Nature doesn’t really factor in deserving or not deserving. Things just “are”.
>Obviously the "bottom 20%" of women by whatever measure you think determines "worth" should be with their "bottom 20%" male counterparts.
This is going to run contrary to one of the basic tenets of modern society - individual freedom. But again, nature doesn’t care about those ideals.
I don't let what "being part of a biological creature" entails dictate my behavior usually, and I don't think you do either. Else you'd be running around butt naked in the savanna, and not typing appeal to nature fallacies on your computer.
Also, please refrain from strawmanning people who don't want kids into "Netflix or TikTok" zombies. This is stupid and achieves nothing.
> Of course, individuals can opt out, but if everyone opts out, we are all dead.
That won't happen, population may decline, yes, but the extinction of humanity is nowhere on the horizon.
No matter the gender of the one staying at home, it creates a problematic power imbalance between the two parts of the couple, where one depends on the other and may be left in trouble if ever the couple should find an end.
True, which was solved like 8,000 years ago by religion/culture, saying you have to marry and support the mother of your children.
It wasn’t perfect of course. Abuse has always been a problem.
Yes, everyone has greater absolute freedom now that we have divorce, and abuse victims are better off, but we have not developed a functioning cultural replacement for the previous cultural arrangement. So, now we have a smaller abuse problem and 2 new problems: both spouses having to maintain excellent careers just in case they get divorced (at the expense of their children and their relationship with their children), AND for those relationship relationships that do end, one or both are still in trouble, as now two households have to be supported with the same amount of income.
I’m not proposing a solution. It’s hard. But I’m just pointing out how we specifically ruined this by completely throwing away the idea of marriage for life and replacing it with “marriage until you’re tired of the person”
PS: I’m divorced (though no kids with that marriage) and remarried, so I’m not pretending to be a moral authority.
No one removed the idea of marriage until you’re tired of the person. Women simply gained civil rights and the ability to earn money and support themselves.
It was commonly accepted for men to have affairs and mistresses, or otherwise neglect wives. Now that they have negotiating power, fewer deals are made, which is to be expected.
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 did? Amazon has recently been showing their Vulkan picking robot, and Aaron Parness still seems to be at Amazon.
they should form a union
Maybe that's what Skynet really was. Robots wanted vacation days and hourly pay, humans said no. Just the 21st century's version of the 19th century's labor wars.
The people or the machines? Or both? :)
i meant the machines but the bigger the union the better.
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 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.
One is anecdotal, one is data.
Is it weird that I can't tell which one? Guangdong has 127 million people and its just the size of Oklahoma. Ok, the Chinese government could be lying about that, but I seriously doubt it.
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.
The arrogance of a comment like this is staggering. So you looked at some satellite photos and talked to ChatGPT and now you’re an expert on the demographics of a city? Crazy.
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?
Are there any proxy for population count? Like may be mobile users, I understand people use more than one.
Yes, I included that in the brackets. There's roughly ~240M registered SIMs, but unlike American phone line where you sign a contract, Nigerian SIMs are bought OTC and are quite disposable. But, they're tied to the National Identity Number which is biometric and hard/impossible to circumvent.
It's quite common to have up to 2-3-4 SIMs also. When when you account for that, you have ~60M-80M-100M phone users.
Another proxy is the Bank verification Number, which like I said, is Nigeria's Social Security Number, but for banking. Can't have a bank account without it. Even in the super-rural parts of Northern Nigeria, they're still banked, which is impossible without a BVN.
Now, there's been ~66M BVNs issued so far, according to a recent update. If we assume that covers the bulk of the adult population (remember, you can do literally nothing without a BVN) and several million teenagers, and account for the median age being 19 (that is, half the entire population is beneath that age), we can infer that Nigeria's population is close to 2* the BVN count.
My best guess is 120M to 140M max given the measurable, unfalsifiable proxies.
Hey, thanks for the inspiration de look here.
I'm strangely bullish on Nigeria. The population stats and the work y'all are doing is just amazing to me. The EkoAltantic project is so big but under the radar that I love it. I keep trying to tell my management that we need to invest in West Africa today to build up brand loyalty now.
What are you thoughts on Nigeria's future in the next 50 years or so?
This is fascinating, thank you for bringing this to the discussion!
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
It's quite possible that China's population has also been significantly exaggerated. One thing that the China actually does quite well is universal childhood vaccination for certain diseases. Independent researchers looked at the number of vaccine doses ordered and found that it's way lower than the official government birth statistics would suggest.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts...
Now this is an unproven "conspiracy theory" but it's entirely plausible that corrupt local officials have inflated population numbers in order to be able to embezzle more of the funds that flow in from the central government. A lot of people might exist only on paper, but it's impossible for outsiders to precisely quantify.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is screening for down's syndrome in the first trimester, but then it becomes a matter of whether they are comfortable with pregnancy termination in case of down syndrome detection (down's syndrome can't be treated).
It is definitely something that you need to think about if you will have kids later in life (in addition to mother safety).
Late first child seems to have some substantial risks, though (what they call) geriatric pregnancies in general may not be as risky.
But even starting in your 30s gives you a big disadvantage, toddlers are fast (the fastest land mammal is a toddler who’s just been asked what he has in his mouth!).
Became a parent mid-30s and I cannot agree more. I didn’t feel old right away, but my first child is somewhat special-needs and it feels like parenting him has aged me 20 years in the past 7. This is a special case, but even with a ‘normal’ kid it’s still true.
The #1 thing I would tell any young person who would listen is that if you want them, finish having children by like 27. I know for most people, that represents a gamble (that you’ll be able to achieve financial stability in the future), but it’s a safer bet than betting that ‘future you’ will be better equipped in all of the non-money ways. Spoiler: older you is worse equipped in most ways. You might have more wisdom to impart, but the children won’t listen to you anyway so that’s moot.
>> The #1 thing I would tell any young person who would listen is that if you want them, finish having children by like 27
Unless one is from a wealthy family, following this advice basically means to give up a career.
Being a mom without a career is being insecure, it could end up in abusive relationship.
Anyone can end up in an abusive relationship, not just women. Choose well, indeed. And choose a career which offers generous benefits.
Also, I know women who work in tech who did that advice and are fine. They make high enough salaries to afford good daycare (or it is provided onsite).
While I wouldn’t like to place all my faith in that happening, that would certainly be a great development.
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.
Im not sure it's got to do with death. Maybe all the would be parents were holding off having kids during war for obvious reasons. Once the war stops they can just continue with their prior plans. It's also the return of the men from war seeing their girlfriends/wives after a long while.
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.
And this is bad why, exactly?
Women already don't want to be mothers--and everybody has pushed so hard that being a housewife is bad!--so what's the issue here?
Because children need mothers. Some women may not want to be mothers, but they all had one. Children need fathers too. They need love. When they don’t get love, they turn into fucked up adults.
A "test tube baby" is simply an IVF pregnancy. What is the problem with parents using IVF to conceive?
IVF isn't a problem per se, and it's great that we have those option for prospective parents who want it. But it's unreliable, expensive, and simply not a scalable solution to anything.
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.
So the Axlotl tanks from Dune.
I’d say artificial womb is a technocratic center-left solution. A right-wing solution would be a proverbial “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” for all women.
I, for one, would bet my firstborn that a solution to the demographic question such that fulfills modern sensibilities is to ever be found.
Nah, the right wing solution would be replacing prison with compulsory pregnancy. Sufficient numbers of convicts can be created by appropriate laws.
This really shows what a bogeyman the “right wing” is to you! Cartoon villains, basically.
> robots to help with child care
Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.
From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part.
The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machines raise your kids will make it so you end up with kids that were raised by machines. Is that what you want? It seems like this is basically already a thing, with the varying amounts of screen time that parents will allow kids.
What if robots were to assist with other tasks while the parent was preoccupied with the child? Like cooking, cleaning up, laundry, shopping.
Sure, but those are incremental gains rather than some sea change. And for the most part that market already exists. The problem is those things have no easy answers. From the list the only thing I can see is some sort of decluttering robot that picked up and put away all the scattered toys, so robot vacuuming could be done. Maybe some kind of integrated laundry machine that did washing and drying in the same space, then a conveyor that sorted/folded/stacked clothes? Those would be helpful, but would ultimately just end up as another "buy this expensive gizmo also, to make your life slightly easier"
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.
While I think such a society would end in a lot of bloodshed, it sounds like it would make for an entertaining sci-fi or anime. I assume the elites would try to condition most or all of these women to be lesbians, to keep them believing that this is about women’s empowerment and not develop ideas of women being unvalued concubines and entertainment for the few Y-chromosome-bearers that survive (who I imagine couldn’t help but develop enormous egos and senses of entitlement).
Who is going to fix things, then?
Not sure what you question is there.
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.
Everything is hostile to having kids. High consumer prices and house rents, media and celebrities advertising short term pleasures, big city way of life in anonymity entertaining alone until death, latest social trends in gender roles, low state financial support to families.
There must take place fundamental social reforms in order to reverse this path. The most important is to create working mothers and not dynamic but single women.
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.
> 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.
I often meditate on this - can even the concept of index fund retirement survive an actual depopulation scenario?
Of course, older forms of retirement can still work (have ten kids each of who have ten kids and you command an army in retirement; perhaps they’ll even call you King) - but aside from that where does the growth come from when not from population or immigration?
Index funds will survive anything short of a complete collapse of the financial system. Even if returns are low, they only have to be better than the alternatives (on a risk adjusted basis).
Sure - but being better than the stock-alternatives in a fifty year bear market is cold comfort; and many retirement plans are built on assumed real returns that may never be seen again.
if the consumer base collapse what will keep the stock fundamentals going ?
Stock values may decline but there will still be index funds holding those stocks.
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.
Case in point - Japan, with so many abandoned homes
In the countryside, I doubt that this is the case in Tokyo.
>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 :)
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.
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.
Basically “if only the Amish have kids, in 200 years there’s going to be a large percentage of Amish”.
That this somehow is a surprise to anybody is baffling.
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
Human culture is subject to evolutionary pressures, just as biological systems, but it can change in a shorter timescale.
Japan’s population dropped rapidly before contraception was allowed in due to abortion.
Abortion beats a strong selection pressure.
Human cultures are also subject to evolutionary pressures and it is likely that we will start seeing intense selection effects at that level much earlier.
> 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.
This article [1] claims that it's actually still quite higher than replacement, to make people around ancient Mediterranean have to resort to various kinds of birth control (be it violent or non violent). Medicinal revolution do lowers death rate significantly but I guess the reason why we haven't normalized late/late marriage pattern as birth control until recently is because of abundance of resource resulted by industrial and agricultural revolution.
1. https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
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.
The modern-day Malthus, except so much worse, because he had the example of Malthus but chose to ignore the lesson there
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
Erlich did not say "there will be scarcity." Erlich said that there would be hundreds of millions dead to starvation.
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.
Access to the sea, uranium, and thirty years of economic planning, money, and political will to build the infrastructure.
We'd have nuclear desalinization in Los Angeles is it was that easy.
> If you have access to the sea and to uranium you can make all the freshwater you need
I don't believe that would be true on a large scale because the seaside would quickly become polluted with brine, and then having an infinite supply of uranium wouldn't help you.
Desalination only works in the long term if there is an unlimited amount of body water to dilute the brine produced by the process.
Do you have to release brine directly into the seaside? What about long pipes with holes that go 50-100 kilometers into the sea?
There's no question of polluting all the oceans with brine. They get freshwater from the rain and the salt came from the oceans in the first place. We aren't net destroying water molecules.
That's a very theoretical point of view. How to maintain those pipes? In two or three years, they will be full of small mollusks and other seafood.
There are many sewer and storm outlets just like this all around the world already
Only the outside. The inside will be full of brine. Once the salinity exceeds a certain value nothing but extremophile bacteria can survive in it.
No, you just evaporate the brine and then you have a large source of lithium for battery production.
No, just use the brine as dirty electrolyte :-)
That article says climate change is an important cause of water scarcity in India. India didn't cause climate change alone or even in large part.
India's TFR dropped below 2 in 2024.
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.
He came to the US Air Force Academy every year to give the incoming freshman class his lecture.
This was mandatory and went on for years.
I distinctly remember he sat in a folding chair next to an overhead projector and used what looked like 20 year old laminate slides (this was in the early 2000s) to go through his pitch.
Is he still doing that at other schools? He must be too old at this point.
I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right.
I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.
The thing is, the people who were saying that were wrong even at the time. Fertility was already declining in the late 60s when The Population Bomb was released, but population was still increasing from the earlier boom, in the same way your car will continue coasting up the hill for a little while even after you release the accelerator. People were freaking out about absolute numbers, instead of extrapolating trends for the data they already had, because they were being actively misled by folks like Ehrlich.
So this is less "we believed one wrong thing, are we now believing a second wrong thing?" than "we believed one wrong thing, and corrected it to what we should have known all along".
One is bad for the the earth, the other is bad for the economy.
Bad for our present (grotesque?) ecology - not bad for the Earth, nor bad for her resident life.
(If humanity decimated itself via overpopulation, Earth & her life - likely even class Mammalia - would be rather better for it, by any metric besides net intelligence.)
> I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done.
It is still true, but it was inaccurately presented as overpopulation, rather than excess resource consumption and entropy generation.
The mass starvation and death is not going to be a sudden nuclear bomb type event, it will be gradual decreases in quality of life due to changing environmental variables leading to changing political climates and eventually physical conflicts.
>I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation.
Moral: Journalists are stupid and ignorant, and you should always keep in mind Gell-Mann amnesia, and go to the source papers.
Ugo Bardi has a post: https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/what-if-malthus-was-righ...
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.
This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the social welfare state.
societies and states have been doing fine without welfare for centuries
"doing fine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
Societies and states have been doing fine without medicines, without electricity and with slavery for centuries. Doesn't mean we need to get back there.
The sheer confidence with which someone working a white collar desk job posts this in the AI age is astounding.
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
70 year olds can work, and will have to. Already in many places you have two positively ancient people where one is the caregiver for the other.
People make it work because they have to, but the pressure of taking care of even more will further reduce the desire to get ahead - that has another mouth to feed.
It is what it is. You do the best you can with what you have.
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.
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.
At some point years of education crimps into childbearing years - I know two women who could easily have obtained their degree even after having a child, but quickly got to a “fuck this shit I’m a mom” and left the program never to return.
I don’t even know if things like FMLA apply to college classes.
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.
That’s the real key to all this - if you want it, you make do, and learn to grab what you can.
Much worse than housing is the vehicle when you cross the 5 or 6 kid boundary, your available vehicles begin to rapidly plummet.
They didn't have birth control then so it was much less of a choice.
Well, then we should say that it is something related to availability of birth control which has caused the change, not some novel preference for living space.
Raised 3 kids in a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC. It’s fine. When they go to college, they marvel at the space they have in a dorm room.
Some families make it work and survive but very few middle class Americans would consider this "fine". For better or worse, most people prefer to have more space and privacy. The notion of raising a family in a cramped apartment seems like torture to me, and the birth rates in urban areas indicate that others agree.
Hmmm... What if a wide variety of economic actors have somehow managed to slurp up all the surplus that previously went to "paying it forward" in terms of raising children?
Rent is a common complaint, but consider the costs of childcare, needing two incomes to stay afloat, etc.
The high cost of childcare also largely comes back to high rents. The management needs to pay for the space, and pay workers enough to afford to live within commuting distance. There are of course other costs to running a day care center (utilities, insurance, supplies) but rent is a major factor here.
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
>The correlation of TFR with wealth is a fact
No one is disputing that... We are talking about declining TFR RATES which are happening across the globe universally.
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).
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?
"The government" is not actually accruing wealth in pretty much any western democracy-- in fact the exact opposite is happening everywhere.
To me it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much. Since the emergence of modern nation states, government responsibilities have grown tremendously, and mostly for good reason:
- Infrastructure basically went from dirt roads to highways/railways/airports
- Tremendously higher benchmarks for services/regulation (education, pensions, food safety, crime prevention, drinking/groundwater quality, lead pollution, mining/heavy industry regulation, healthcare/-regulation)
A lot of those things are new enough that I would argue we are still stabilizing on their total costs, and current government budgets (high AND red literally everywhere) are basically humanity finding out that all those things are not free.
But I would also argue that for a big majority of people, this is still a rather decent deal; I would rather pay current (or even higher) levels of taxes than to suffer from lead poisoning, have children crippled from quackery/insufficiently tested medication or needing to pay protection money to the mob.
But I'm quite curious: What do you think is the problematic part of government growth? Do you think that Doge, specifically, is successful in identifying and quelling it?
> "The government" is not actually accruing wealth
I tend to agree with that. But there's no doubt it is dissipating vast amounts of wealth.
> it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much
There's a vast amount of waste in government spending, and waste as a result of heavy regulation. If you're really interested,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
I do agree with you that there is a lot of overhead and waste in the healthcare industry and government in general.
But this insight is, to me, just not really actionable.
Almost every large organisation seems to end up with a good amount of bloat/overhead sooner or later, and this even includes former super-lean and super-focused enterprises (Intel, Google, AWS, ...), so I don't see how you could ever sidestep this problem completely with the government.
Just cutting regulators and government responsibilities in general also seems a really bad idea to me. Reading that article, how many of its complaints would be solved by fully deregulating and letting the market take care of things?
1) Avoidable infections exacerbated by laziness/cost cutting
2) Lack of price/cost transparency
3) Healthcare costs being wasted on advertising/middlemen
4) Doctors specializing in fields that pay well instead of the ones that are most needed to improve health outcomes
I'd argue that none of those would be improved by switching to unregulated private healthcare, and a bunch of them would very likely get worse.
Another thing to consider when cutting regulation are huge possible negative externalities in general.
Just take leaded gasoline as an easy example (because the bill for CO2 emissions is not in yet). The industry basically "self-regulated" until the 60s (and only because it became infeasible to continue hiding lead toxicity by paying or threatening scientists, which it had done for the previous decades): Total costs/damages were enormous-- probably millions of lifeyears lost, but industry/shareholders did not pay a dime after reaping the profits.
How could drastic cuts in regulations avoid disastrous outcomes like that?
Every large organization does indeed accumulate bloat/overhead sooner or later. For a profit making company, this means it loses its competitiveness and then falls. For government, this means it gets a bigger budget.
The leaded gasoline example is also a disaster. That does not generalize to every regulation being good. For example, regulations prevent victims of the Palisades fire from rebuilding. For another example, rent control.
Reading the article, the bit about Lasik eye surgery resulting in major reductions in cost is pretty illustrative.
Some years back, Frontline did an episode on dental care fraud. It seems the government set up a program to pay dentists to do major dental operations on poor people. Clinics then set up solely to do major dental operations on poor people, and raked in the government money. The trouble was, those people did not need dental operations. Frontline's "solution" was to propose heavy regulation. That won't work, either, because medical fraud to get government money is rampant and pervasive.
You might also consider the software business, which has pretty much zero regulation. It is also a gigantic engine of prosperity in the US, despite having driven costs down to literally zero. There have been many proposals to regulate it, but fortunately none have managed to do so.
You can retire the other way around - since you need roughly $20 saved for every dollar you need in retirement, reducing expenses by a dollar is as good as saving $20.
Rational millennials who will have to work until 75 at current rates may also complain :)
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.
> 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
In 2003 the average fertility rate was around 2.03
It started falling to 1.6 around 2008 ( https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni... ) which coincided with the millennials getting into the child-bearing age. And the millennials are much more likely to live in cities, even though they don't want that: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245249/americans-big-idea-livin...
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.
It's a well-known phenomenon. E.g.: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-008-9163-9
It's been eroding lately, but mostly because fewer younger people can afford to live in suburbs. By "afford", I don't mean monetary cost, but the lack of easily accessible jobs.
I'm investigating that, and I believe that it's even _worse_ than the simple fertility rate shows. If you look specifically at the number of parents with two or more children, suburbs completely demolish cities when you control for the average income.
Controlling for the average income is needed because of the two poles of fertility: desperately poor people, and happy content people ("reversed J-curve"). And cities in the US disproportionally concentrate desperately poor people.
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.
Suburbs might not be friendly to children but they're quite friendly to the parents of small children. When you're pressed for time and need to cook dinner or something it's super convenient to be able to send the kids into the back yard or their own separate bedrooms, knowing they'll be fairly safe and contained for a while.
Remote work is a great option for many people but it simply isn't feasible for any job that can't be done through a computer. We should set economic policies that encourage job growth in suburban and rural areas rather than trying to squeeze everything into a handful of dense cities.
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.
Fertility rates can be wildly swung by outliers, and while it is possible to walk with five kids under the age of six, it is a maneuver that requires substantial logistical support or specialized equipment (which can be as hard or harder to store than a car).
https://www.communityplaythings.com/products/outdoor/kinderv... Things like this are 1% or so of the cost of a suburban house! That’s noticeable!
> 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.
Yes, and now look at their fertility rates.
I’m not saying that Japan has it all figured out, just that cities can be built to allow many families to thrive without a car. Japan has their own set of issues w.r.t birthrate, but it’s partially a different set than those seen in the US.
OK. Can you get a double stroller into busy Tokyo subway during the rush hour?
Probably not, but I barely see strollers over there anyway, and it’s also rare to take kids on the train/subway during rush hour. Kids are usually carried or toted in one of those front-body-kid-carriers (sorry don’t know the name) until they can walk, after which they walk (or for longer rides, get taken on a bike). If I see little kids on the train it’s most often before or after rush hour during the slower times.
A lot of American norms don’t carry over.
Thank you for illustrating exactly why dense cities are inimical to having more than one child.
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
And you'll be doing them, whether you like it or not.
'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".
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.)
What amuses me is that once you’ve worked out the function to have a kid, it’s easy to have another.
In theory there should be tons of childless people and some balancing number of 10+ kid families. Then the average numbers work out, everyone is from a large family, but the means of production are centralized and efficient.
'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.
Your first example is completely wrong. Trees are a renewable resource. In North America, most of the trees that are cut down to build houses were intentionally grown for that purpose and are selectively harvested in a way that preserves the long-term value of the land.
Meh, sort of. Today's construction lumber is nearly all farmed, true. But CITES exists for a reason. The demand for certain woods greatly outstraps supply, and deforestation and smuggling is a real problem that's difficult to solve. And that's even without considering deforestation that's done to open up new farmland.
Madagascar is the obvious example here highlighting both issues, but it's certainly not unique.
> "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?
They might take care of their land, but they don’t generally care what happens to other peoples land. So excess fertilizer creating dead zones downstream? Well sucks to be them I guess. Markets are not good at pricing in externalities such as those
A proper function of government is to internalize the externalities (with fines or taxes).
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.
The person who owns it bought it from person who created it.
The person who bought it then manages it, maintains it, organizes it, advertises it, pays taxes on it, etc.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
If rentable places were not allowed to be sold, very very few would exist. This is because people specialize - some build rentals, some manage them. Both are productive enterprises.
You can become a landlord if you want. Borrow the money, buy a rental, and rent it out. But you'll find out it's a lousy business.
I broadly agree with you, but there is really a point here about land ownership.
Although developments of the land do improve the value, and thus land ownership has significant utility economically by incentivizing this, there isn't really an economic justification for the owner receiving value for the land itself- why should someone have exclusive rights to a piece of land they didn't create? They bought it, sure, but why did the previous owner have perpetual exclusive rights?
I'd advocate for a small property tax as a replacement for other taxes, because the component that does tax "land value" won't cause economic harm, but all of income tax causes deadweight loss. (Note, Land Value Tax is great in theory, but impossible to define practically- property tax good enough, much harder to game!)
Note that in practice, the biggest abuser of land hoarding is local governments with extremely restrictive zoning that stops productive development of the land- from an economic perspective they own the land, and have sold (or in reality, seized) some but not all of the rights from the 'landowner'. Although this can have advantages to help with coordination problems, in practice it's caused enormous economic damage to many cities by preventing development. At its heart, it's a problem with land hoarding.
>The person who owns it bought it from person who created it.
The land was not created, it existed long before humans. It was taken by force and the strong began extracting rent from the weak.
I'll check out of diverting this into a 10,000 year old grievance.
> 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.
Totally and utterly wrong, a complete misunderstanding of capitalism
Let me explain.
Access to capital is key. If you have it you can do business, if you do not you cannot, in general terms
There is more than one way to access capital, debt is very common.
And to get rich you have to do business
So if you are already rich getting more money, in a free market, is easier than getting started, in a free market
That is the point, and one small example,e. This pattern repeates o er and over. Once you have money getting more money is much easier than getting the first money
So in free markets the wealth divides tend to increase.
This is very elementary, stage II economics
I don't know who you're writing this to. You're not addressing any point I brought up.
> the folks who equate new borrowings with income
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.
The "Boots theory" of economics is garbage, just utter nonsense. I don't understand why people keep mentioning it here without applying any critical thinking. It simply doesn't apply to the vast majority of actual consumer products. Some of most durable, longest-lasting footwear I ever bought was also among the cheapest. By contrast the expensive stuff tends to be fussy, fragile, and impossible to repair. This generally applies to apparel, electronics, automobiles, appliances, bicycles, firearms, etc.
Where do you buy shoes?
That is the exact opposite of my (and Cpt. Vines) experience
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"?
> Is there an upper bound to the creation of wealth?
No
> Is it infinite?
Yes
> Are there any limits to its creation?
Government trying to crush it.
> Is there any inherent value to it without being able to "transfer"?
The only value it has is what someone else is freely willing to pay for it. There is no such thing as "inherent" value.
I find the belief that government is the only limit to wealth creation very intriguing. I also find it interesting that the talking points usually contrast "free markets", which I assume represents the best case, with just "government". Markets can be limited or impacted by forces outside of government (price fixing, monopolies, manipulation). Is there an equivalent best-case scenario for "governments" that we can use as a reference when discussing how they impact free markets?
Nobody has discovered any limit to wealth creation, but governments have been very successful with putting a stop to it.
> 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.
I have a comment above about access to capital, which is much easier if you already have it, so the rich have more access than the poor to the main tool of capitalism.
But another example, equity: If I am raising money for my startup, and I have no traack record (I'm poor in this context) and Sam is doing the same after Sam made a successful exit from their last startup, who would you invest in, all else equal, Sam or me? Sam if you are rational
Thus the rich have more access to equity than the poor
This is a pattern that repeats over and over in free markets
How do you define "free market"?
Transactions based on free negotiations, not force or fraud.
Link to the keynote presentation, fills a lot of the gaps in the slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk
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.”
if humans stop age and live for thousands years, then there is no need for specific replacement rate.
Alternative, make it possible to have kids without heavy burden on the woman body.
Alternative, make it possible to become pregnant at 50-60 years.
This is all research vectors that we should work on, and not doom on hypothetical what ifs in the future!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...
We must act IMMEDIATELY to secure london from this great tidal wave of horse manure.
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]
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.
> using tax dollars to effectively subsidize private profits.
Yeah thats the entire point lmao.
there are many indirect effects. Imagine a factory employing 80 low-wage "takers" (line workers etc) and 20 high-wage "makers" (managers etc). The owners of the factory make $1 million in profit every month as a taxable dividend. Well if you get rid of the line workers: no more factory, no more managers, no more dividend. This is why honest analyses go beyond simple tax balance accounting.
The other big impact is on price level. When you have an inverted population pyramid, fewer workers need to support more retirees and this shows up as inflation concentrated in labor-intensive industries like healthcare. So even if a program like Medicare really had more tax receipts per beneficiary after reducing immigration, it would also be spending much more per beneficiary under a labor shortage.
> each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes
I'm not familiar with the writer but their definition of "non-western" is a bit weird to me. I don't know what criteria were used or whether these are Denmark's classifications or the author's own.
The chart captioned "Violent crime conviction rates for immigrants in 2010–2021 by nation of origin expressed in multiples of the Danish conviction rate" says, for example, that Greece is Western but its neighbor North Macedonia is "other". Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania - all Western, but Czechoslovakia is "other". Croatia? Western, but curiously not Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, or Yugoslavia. There's no rhyme or reason here.
People originating from these debatably Western (or non-Western, I literally don't know but it's inconsistent either way) countries all have conviction rates above the Danish rate. Which would muddle the narrative of that particular chart a fair bit. Maybe it makes no difference to the fiscal question though.
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.
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...
this "further analysis" is comically biased, misinformed, misapplied mush. It's honestly like a gish gallop to quote this shit. Well, I read it, so I'm going to take the time.
> produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes
This is an absolute lie, pulled from the trash. Maybe you just didn't understand it -- I hope!
Claiming that either the distribution of contributions across ages, or the "age adjusted average net contributions" graph portray some kind of a "long term" picture of what people's contributions over the next two generations would be is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the graph and data represent, or is capable of representing.
The first chart is simply a calculation of contribution in 2018 by age. The second is a remapping of 2018's immigrant population's 2018 contributions and costs from their then-age distribution to proportions equivalent to the then danish-native age distribution. It has nothing to do with either populations' prospective future contributions. It's just a convolution of data which is presently skewed by extreme circumstance, i.e. being an active asylum seeker by definition means you are recently economically unstable, and far more likely to be a member of specific age demographics. It is not a projection of any likely future; it is solely a lens to remove one confounding factor -- the very different age distributions of the instantaneous populations compared -- for the purpose of comparing their 2018 contributions directly.
And then it goes off into justifying its conclusions by comparing "countries by IQ"?! Pure hack slop, and nothing else. There's references to coronavirus lies, and this being "an immigrant invasion" -- this is not remotely convincing nor unbiased, nor even an interesting analysis. It is just kinda long and filled with errors. Like I said: bit of a gish gallop.
To draw from it, and parrot its erroneous claims like they should convince us as they convinced you, the disinterested and enlightened scientist, is a new nadir on your dismal intellectual track record.
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.
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.
> any common idea that we can agree on
I'm afraid there is no common ground anymore.
There is nothing "smug" about having an opinion. And there are no compromises in sight.
However, while 2020 helped a lot to escalate the situation, I also feel like politics were always pretty hopeless. Its just that if you grow older, you learn more about what is going on, so things seem increasingly bleek.
Having an opinion is totally fine, of course. I meant that "I told you so" is a bit like pouring gasoline on a fire and doesn't really help the situation.
I agree that politics were always hopeless. We don't really have a mechanism to preserve political experiences, so every couple generations we repeat the same stupid mistakes.
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.
If what you write were true, there wouldn't be any borders on this planet. However, there are. The right to free movement is simply not true. If you want that to be true, advocate for the removal of all borders worldwide.
Well, "data" can't be trusted either, because it is released/announced very selectively. And the media doesn't help either, because data which contradicts the chosen narrative isn't published/commented. In general, I am missing independent journalism. Most of what we get these days is agenda-driven.
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.
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?
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.
The article was not a "troll".
That one was it their worst, but I'm saying the publican in general has a bad rep.
Leading with the debt scare is not good either (yes the slides also mentioned that). It's conflating layers of abstraction to talk about a people shortage, and issuing debt. Money doesn't create more people, after all.
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.
I'm quite tired of this topic being brought up all the time. What's the solution? We've seen that economic incentives won't do, so what? Force women to have children? Punish celibates? Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended), the "solutions" to this "crisis" are worse than the outcome.
Look on the bright side, a declining demography makes human activity that much more sustainable, and maybe our descendants won't even have to worry about restricting their carbon emissions to keep the planet inhabitable.
In the meantime, we'll have to take a cut to our way of life, which I can live with. We don't need to travel to the other side of the globe yearly, we don't need three cars per household, etc.
It's quite telling that the people most concerned with this usually self-label as "pro-markets libertarians". Is market health more important than bodily autonomy? What happened to freedom?
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.
+100 climate change is the more immediate Big Global Problem. Let's fix that first then figure this one out.
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.
Financialization can also make it appear wealth has increased when really nothing has happened.
If all property is “owned” by the crown and people only have various “rights” to it that can be inherited but never encumbered or sold, then there’s really no point in “valuing” the land beyond simple comparisons.
Once land can be bought and sold value appears to track it; but the land was always there.