[1] https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt ("Global public debt surpasses $100 trillion in 2024.")
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
Happiness is reality minus expectations.
[1] https://x.com/KenRoth/status/1753526235173450213 | https://archive.today/rY4WG
One quarter of adult children estranged from a parent - https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4104138-one-qua... - July 19th, 2023
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.
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.
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 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...
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?
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.
I would argue that with companies, the expected outcome is that they accumulate and then stabilize at a "typical" level of bloat. For software, Google is a good example: Much more bloated than they used to be, but still competitive enough, and looking stable.
Governments also have some ways to de-bloat, mostly from internal and external pressure (like Greece).
I think that consistently getting services at no-bloat prices is just not realistic in general over longer timeframes; Netflix, Google, Uber, Amazon, ... give countless examples of excellent early price/quality ratios that got inevitably worse over time.
My hypothesis is that for our current understanding of what a government is supposed to provided (which did expand significantly since WW2, but mostly for good reasons) we have now reached a "bloat-stable" budget, and there is just no "easy" way to slash this budget without hurting the services (even though in a hypothetical bloat-free environment these could be provided for less).
Here is interesting data which seems to kinda support my point, with government spending as GDP percentage for the US, Germany (less GDP/capita) and Switzerland (more GDP/capita): You can see budgets rising post WW2 across the board, and then stabilizing in the 30-40% range (slightly higher for the poorest country, which makes sense). I would have honestly expected to see those trending up even for the last decades (which they don't really) and Covid was also less prominent than I would have assumed:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/government-spending-vs-gd...
Here's a reductio ad absurdum: a couple live alone on an isolated island, they have and raise one child, and when they reach 67 they stop working and expect their progeny to provide for them as they were provided for in childhood.
Two parents provided for three people, became three adults providing for three people, became one adult providing for three people.
And when that kid reaches 67 and also decides to stop working? Now nobody's around to provide for them, so nothing is provided.
(What will happen in the non-reductio case is much more complex and unpredictable, between the never-ending potential of nuclear wars, and the ongoing but never guaranteed promise of technological progress currently dangling AI and robotics before us like a laser pointer to a cat…)
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."
My parents raised eleven children in a typical four-bedroom suburban tract house.
I wonder why modern people would be different?
Much worse than housing is the vehicle when you cross the 5 or 6 kid boundary, your available vehicles begin to rapidly plummet.
Rent is a common complaint, but consider the costs of childcare, needing two incomes to stay afloat, etc.
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
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).
No one is disputing that... We are talking about declining TFR RATES which are happening across the globe universally.
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 is caused by the government via deficit spending. It's another tax on you.
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.
I'm old, and I've heard that my entire life. Something's wrong with your assessment.
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
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes, and now look at their fertility rates.
A lot of American norms don’t carry over.
https://www.communityplaythings.com/products/outdoor/kinderv... Things like this are 1% or so of the cost of a suburban house! That’s noticeable!
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 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.
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.
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.
Have you a recent reference for that? I think even that correlation has broken down, but I do not know
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.
I don’t even know if things like FMLA apply to college classes.
[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
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".
That's a theory from economists. Economists have a lot of theories.
And where did Musk's money come from? Who did he transfer it from?
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.
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 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.
Note that I remarked that free markets did not include fraud.
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.
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 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.
Both of those are an exchange, not a transfer. Taxation is a transfer.
We are arguing whether wealth flows to people who already have it, rather people who "create it". My augment is both.
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.
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 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.
The land was not created, it existed long before humans. It was taken by force and the strong began extracting rent from the weak.
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.
"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.
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?
Madagascar is the obvious example here highlighting both issues, but it's certainly not unique.
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
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.
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
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.
That is the exact opposite of my (and Cpt. Vines) experience
I’m probably not old enough yet to share my opinion on societal change across generations, I was a kid until recently.
(A relative worked out our family tree. Lots of families with 8 kids in them.)
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.
The free market hasn't figured out how to create more land. Especially arable land.
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.
Take a moment and elaborate, please.
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
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.
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.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/successful-educated-but-no...
[2] https://citizenmatters.in/mumbai-abandoned-destitute-elderly...
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.
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.
We could just kill ourselves, since we don't seem to care much for life, reproduction, and all that.
The above shows the boom started in the 40s in the U.S. after 140 years of gradual decline.
I think his explanation fits the thesis of his recent book, which I actually like, but it seem a bit off here.
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!).
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.
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.
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).
It is definitely something that you need to think about if you will have kids later in life (in addition to mother safety).
I, for one, would bet my firstborn that a solution to the demographic question such that fulfills modern sensibilities is to ever be found.
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?
In this new imbalanced society, a TFR well below 2 will still allow a stable, or even growing, population.
I read that people were copulating in the streets of London the day of the Armistice.
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.
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.
Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.
> 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-...
Every country on earth claims this.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah thats the entire point lmao.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The real markets are absolutely not ready for that reality.
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.
In South Florida it's always been like that or more.
No imagination required :)
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…
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?
Recorded talk for the slides in this post.
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.
Abortion beats a strong selection pressure.
Only within a lifetime.
Over several generations, it doesn't beat selection pressure, is selection pressure: people who want (or are willing to get) abortions get selected against.
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.
1. https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
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.
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.
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.
Also remember the DRC is almost a million square miles. So it’s 1.5x Alaska.
Personal experience Vs. looking at pictures from the basement....
I expect it to be USA policy soon.
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.
But, once you dig into the figures, you realize it'd be a miracle if Nigeria has up to half of the population it claims.
Every single census that's been conducted has been marred by controversy, with states trying to buff up their populations to make their ethnicity/region look bigger and more important.
But, proxies like registered BVN (like Social Security Number, but for bank accounts) are just under 70M. Registered phone lines (~240M; each person usually owns 3-5) are similarly lackluster. Domestic demand is nothing to write home about if you run a CPG business. Zoom into a satellite view of a city that's supposed to have ~700k to 1M people and it looks like a suburb - just scanty.
Nigeria's most populous city claims to have 20M people - 2* the population of Seoul, one of the most urbanized, dense, vertical cities in the world, meanwhile, Lagos is just a sprawling slum.
Personally, I feel population counts across Africa are grossly overestimated. A good estimate would be 600-800M, but where's the fun in that when we can fearmonger about overpopulation?
You estimate a factor of two for over estimate, believable, but higher than I would have thought. Makes sense with the context of getting more revenue. Thank you
I caution you against the "I looked at satellite image" nonsense. Your lived experience is very valuable. Looking at a satellite image is not
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
This is funny to mention, because studies on sex life show the opposite: https://www.peterhaas.org/why-church-attendees-have-the-best...
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.
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...
For what is worth, I remember when being a kid such uncles were superimportant to me and I remember them fondly.
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.
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.
The "purpose" of sex is whatever we choose it to be.
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.
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.
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.
My sex drive would not have been less a few generations back. The results would have just been possibly very different.
> 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.
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.”
Generational despair, on the other hand …
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.
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.
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.
The strongest correlation I see is urbanization. People in cities don’t have kids as much.
(Also fewer child deaths)
- 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?
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.
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.
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.
It’s more similar to how families slept for millennia.
You say that likes it's a bad thing?
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Days show porn use and fertility rate negatively correlate. Makes sense from first order effects researchers see on ED rates, etc.
> 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.
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".
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.
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).
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.
Biology is weird.
note the “average worker”.
If women were staying at home with children, they were not counted as workers.
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.
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.
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...
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.”
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.
Raoul Pal primary thesis about macroeconomics is that Demographics is everything. Here is a 54 second video of him highlighting that issue.
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.
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.
Or they think that they do, due to what the zeitgeist urges. We can never really know.
Seems clear that once “it” could be avoided, the individuals started making choices beneficial for themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
We must act IMMEDIATELY to secure london from this great tidal wave of horse manure.
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!
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?
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.
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.
(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.)
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".
Moral: Journalists are stupid and ignorant, and you should always keep in mind Gell-Mann amnesia, and go to the source papers.
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.
api•5mo ago
profstasiak•5mo ago
what is he wrong about?
UncleMeat•5mo ago
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."
api•5mo ago
UncleMeat•5mo ago
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.
lurk2•5mo ago
What is this referring to?
pearlsontheroad•5mo ago
UncleMeat•5mo ago
* 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.
api•5mo ago
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.
selimthegrim•5mo ago
rendang•5mo ago
api•5mo ago
xp84•5mo ago
Is there some shitposting fringe that says dumb things like “abolish all BC”? Yes, just as there are matching “sOcIaLiSt” idiots who think that if we “just” confiscate all of Musk and Bezos’ net worth, it’ll pay off everyone’s student loans plus pay for UBI, free college in perpetuity, and buy all of Gen Z nice houses.
Animats•5mo ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_India
FredPret•5mo ago
This is a technological and economic problem, not an overpopulation problem.
JPLeRouzic•5mo ago
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.
triceratops•5mo ago
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.
JPLeRouzic•5mo ago
FredPret•5mo ago
spauldo•5mo ago
mensetmanusman•5mo ago
JPLeRouzic•5mo ago
spauldo•5mo ago
We'd have nuclear desalinization in Los Angeles is it was that easy.
UncleMeat•5mo ago
triceratops•5mo ago
India's TFR dropped below 2 in 2024.
FredPret•5mo ago
AndrewKemendo•5mo ago
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.
hermitcrab•5mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Most never get held to account for their wrong predictions. But he seems a particularly egregious case.