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The Economics of Falling Populations

69 points by prostoalex 6y ago

Glavnokoman 6y ago
"But fewer people may also mean fewer new ideas". May. Or may not. My bet is fewer people mean fewer hours spent watching shit @Netflix and similar.
- tim333 6y ago
  Yeah us old folk have ideas too!
- ThomPete 6y ago
  It only require one person to come up with something that transforms society completely. The more people we have to more likely some of them will do that.
  - dsnr 6y ago
    I disagree, most of the countries with booming populations are rather poor and don’t do much innovation or research. In the age we live in it’s almost impossible for a lone wolf to fix a big problem of the humankind because of complexities involved. What is necessary instead is team work and funding innovation. Individuals don’t count as much anymore.
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      We need both and that require more not less people.
      - wsc981 6y ago
        > We need both and that require more not less people. A lot of problems would be solved 'automatically' if the world population would be reduced.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        The world will always face problems and we will always be the victim of these if we don't have the knowledge to combat them. The more people we are the more we are likely to produce the wealth, knowledge and solutions for those problems. The idea that the worlds population is a problem is in my world an antihuman stance which keeps popping up even tough it keeps being proven wrong. Wether Maltahus, Erlich or the UN.
        imtringued 6y ago
        >The idea that the worlds population is a problem is in my world an antihuman stance which keeps popping up even tough it keeps being proven wrong. Wether Maltahus, Erlich or the UN. Ok, I will stay in my pragmatically driven (being in favor of endless population growth is just another ideology, being in favor of neither is pragmatism), non population exploding enclave and become rich in the process. I'll be looking forward to seeing Africa mass produce poor people. Your ideology requires technological progress to always be faster than human population growth, sure you can keep this up another 300 years but at some point you are going to trip.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        You say it's not pragmatic yet history seems to disagree with you. Humans create resources we don't just find them. 300 years from now we are either harvesting the universe or we are just sitting ducks waiting for some giant cataclysmic event. At least my "ideology" gives us a chance where as yours just wait for us to join natures 99.9% extinction rate.
        erik_seaberg 6y ago
        The green revolution narrowly averted catastrophe by modernizing farming worldwide. How could we do that more than once?
        ThomPete 6y ago
        Not sure what you mean. How did the green revolution avert catastrophe?
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >I disagree, most of the countries with booming populations are rather poor and don’t do much innovation or research. That's for different historical reasons than their booming populations. They are still very dynamic economic wise, but have to start from a very low bar. But any country that was ever important had tons of people. Franch and UK and Germany were hugely important globally when they were among the top-5 most populous countries in the world (that was the case back in 19th century). Then the US took that role, and had a good run.
      - throwaway316943 6y ago
        Cause or effect?
        coldtea 6y ago
        Cause.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    We weren't desperately short of ideas when the world population was $1billion and the proportion with education, money and prospects for social advancement was still small. I think we'll cope pretty well with a small drop-off, especially if that's coupled with much of the world getting better prospects at the same time.
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      we are short on knowledge not ideas. We aren't short of resources. More people make us more wealthy which gives us better chance of creating more knowledge.
    - chr1 6y ago
      One thing to consider is that the sciene problems we have to solve now are much harder than what we had to deal with 200 years ago at 1 billion population. You are correct that what matters is mostly the population living in soceities organized well enough for their inhabitants to have better prospects. But sadly becoming a country with "better prospects" is not a simple thing. In fact, population decreasing in rich western countries, has a rather deleterious effect on the poor countries. I being from a third world country see everyday how people who could help to fix my country end up emigrating because rich countries need more people. So it's not at all clear whether much of the world getting better prospects will compensate for population decreasing, or much of the world will get worse prospects because of population decreasing.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    It only require one person to come up with something that transforms society completely I hear this a lot, in the context of, we must keep growing the global population on the off chance that someone may be born who comes up with a way to live on an over-populated, polluted, resource-depleted planet. It's nonsense.
    - chr1 6y ago
      Is Netherlands an overpopulated and polluted country? It is one of the best countries i have seen and its population density is 10 times higher than world average, so we can have 70 billion people living on earth without even discovering anything new. As for resource depletion, 3.5 vs 7 billion people doesn't make that much difference, both are more than earth can support naturally without us constantly finding new ways to obtain resources. After all the largest extinctions we have caused so far were megafauna extinctions 10k years ago and we managed to do that with just a few millions of people.
    - logicchains 6y ago
      >I hear this a lot, in the context of, we must keep growing the global population on the off chance that someone may be born who comes up with a way to live on an over-populated, polluted, resource-depleted planet. It's nonsense. Standards of living globally are better than at any time in the past, yet in spite of the continued failed predictions of disaster people have been making for the past couple hundred years, people still persist in making such predictions. Willfully ignoring humanity's ability to adapt and overcome, that's the real nonsense.
      - antisthenes 6y ago
        The first part of it is nonsense - quantity of people does not translate into quality and innovation automatically. You have to free people from drudgery and spend tons on their education, and provide them with a stable environment in which to work, and cultural encouragement for the parents to nourish children's curiosity. Only then can you hope to generate ideas that surpass our already quite formidable body of knowledge, and it's still not guaranteed. > yet in spite of the continued failed predictions of disaster people have been making for the past couple hundred years, people still persist in making such predictions. They only have to be right once. On a geological time scale, a disaster is certainly inevitable. Not that I necessarily agree with doomsaying all the time. Population growth isn't the biggest issue we're facing.
  - PicassoCTs 6y ago
    Ideas are like sand at an ocean beach. But paths to a working implementation are rare. And by now mined by great companies with patent lawyers, to prevent disruption. If you are big and successful, new ideas are the poison.The only vector for new idea implementations to make it big, is other behemoths want to eat old behemoths. Apple/Android eating Kodak. The individual does rarely factor into that. Unless s/he knows how to move giants into funny game constellations. Which becomes ever less likely, as most giants today are owned by pension funds, who prefer stability over change. Contrary what the propaganda tells us, nobody wants ideas, nobody wants change, not even those trying to emulate market capitalism to prevent political backlash. Which makes ideas worse then worthless. Its something the "No-Future"-coporate-cartel will come down upon you for.
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      Which is why the more people we have to work on the problem the better. The individuals DO factor into that but it require a framework the individuals best suited for solving these problems can work within which allow them to spend the time needed to create the knowledge to solve the problems which requires wealth which require growth i.e. requires society (i.e. us)
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >It only require one person to come up with something that transforms society completely Progress takes many people working together to shape ideas and build things. And an aging society would be less inclined to change and adopt it, run by more older people resistant to some new idea, and have less young people with the dynamism to put such idea in action even if it was adopted.
    - throwaway316943 6y ago
      An older, more experienced population may be less inclined to chase the latest new trend but they are better able to weigh the merits of new ideas against the harms they may induce and will generally do a better job of applying existing and new technology to the problem at hand. Experience and knowledge count for a lot and the vitality of youth is often wasted on the young.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        >An older, more experienced population may be less inclined to chase the latest new trend but they are better able to weigh the merits of new ideas against the harms they may induce Theoritically. In practice they're more concerned with their own mortality, and weighing the merits of some new diet or therapy for hemmorhoids or some such...
- nathias 6y ago
  Not really, it means fewer new ideas if all other factors are the same. Of course, education, creativity and means to extract this ideas count as well.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Well, education and creativity will also decline in an aging population.
    - nathias 6y ago
      For the aged people yes, but not for populations, there could be an increase of education and creativity that would offset the natural decline.
BelenusMordred 6y ago
Always thought the unspoken onus is on OP to provide a non-paywalled link. Here's the full article from a week ago: https://archive.is/937Dt https://archive.is/937Dt > a recent paper inspired by their book, by Charles Jones, an economist at Stanford University, argues that over the long run any positive economic effects that come from a shrinking population may be cancelled out by the reduction in humankind’s creative capacity. If ideas drive growth and people are the source of ideas, he writes, then the fate of our species depends crucially on long-run population trends We have more creatives than we can already handle, more talented PhD scientists, researchers and engineers than a dozen Earths can afford to fund. In the face of relentless environmental degradation, greenhouse pollution and a scientific consensus that our planets sixth great extinction event occurring right now is solely caused by humans, how can anyone make statements like this with a straight face? Energy and resource exploitation is rising rapidly in the developing world, were they to consume as much per person as the West overnight the planet would be ruined very quickly.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Really? How so? Is the west irreparably ruined? Still seems quite livable in 2021. National forest ecosystems are quite healthy. Environmental protections are actually enforced here. Conservation is properly funded. Seems like this is not true in developing countries.
  - jbergens 6y ago
    The west uses more resources per capita than the world as a whole. If all parts would try to use as much the resources would not be enough. We might deplate the food resources, oil, gas and also cause irreparable damage to the environment.
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      The west also invented many of these resources. Before we found ways to turn them into resources they were useless. You are following the same line of reasoning we heard about how the earth couldnt sustain 4 billion, 5 billion, yet here we are wealthier, safer, more numerous than ever because we found ways to transform completely useless materials into valuable resources.
stereolambda 6y ago
For beyond the population peak, these guys forecast too far ahead for their predictions to be realistic (there will be unknown confounding factors along the way). The "too few ideas" claim is also weird. For you to contribute some ideas to the global economy, at the very least you need some access to capital, that currently most of the world doesn't have. Having good education and some freedom from spending all time and all your energy just to survive on subsistence level also helps. In production of ideas, lifting people everywhere to the Western middle class standard of living and mindset is far more important than raw population count. This would probably require bringing industrial labor wages to a more realistic level everywhere, also in poorer countries. The whole system of relying on cheap labor in developing countries would have to change somewhat with decelerating population. The stuff in the West would be more expensive, although maybe with fewer workers wages couldn't be so stagnant. The model of buying materials and labor cheap somewhere and selling stuff highish to Western population would be harder to sustain, making many businesses less viable. Maybe this is especially scary for people that are heavily into capital. This is my personal take and it's somewhat related to the post-Black Death phenomena in Europe that the article mentions. There's also "The Great Demographic Reversal" book where the authors apparently also predict rising inflation and take into account aging of the population (I've only watched an interview with one of the authors).
- eru 6y ago
  > The whole system of relying on cheap labor in developing countries would have to change somewhat with decelerating population. The stuff in the West would be more expensive, although maybe with fewer workers wages couldn't be so stagnant. I don't think so. Lots of stuff we consume in the west is made in China. Chinese wages have gone up like crazy in the last few decades. (Not that they are particularly high now, they just used to be sooo low.) Yet, stuff hasn't gotten more expensive for us. The causality runs the other way: Wages go up when productivity goes up. Productivity going up in China means they can make more with less work. So if anything, the proportion of the price in our cheap imported stuff that goes towards labour costs tends to fall as Chinese labour gets more productive.
  - starfallg 6y ago
yhoiseth 6y ago
Scale by Geoffrey West and Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo both support on the idea that we need a lot of people to have a high standard of living. They come at it from different angles, but agree that (large) social networks are crucial for the generation and execution of ideas.
- imtringued 6y ago
  It is entirely possible that taking our current society and rearranging it will produce more total output than simply adding more people.
skissane 6y ago
I think in the long-run, natural selection will prefer subcultures with higher birth rates, and through that population growth will eventually start rising again. Many of those subcultures are growing exponentially, but coming off quite a low base, so in most countries it is going to take decades, even a century or two, to see the impact at the national and global levels. (Some countries will be seeing it sooner than others–witness the growth of the ultra-Orthodox sector in Israel.) It will be a rather different population, likely more religious and more conservative, considering that many of the subcultures with higher birth rates are conservative religious subcultures – and, the more conservative and religious a group is, the higher their birth rate tends to be. A society dominated by religious conservatives may produce a slower rate of technological innovation as much as one with a more secular but declining population does. On the other hand, there will always be defections – even highly insular groups such as Old Order Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews can still have a 5-20% defection rate, and with less insular groups the defection rate tends to be higher – and those defections will help replenish the secular component of the population. Another factor to note, is that many wealthy countries are avoiding population decline through immigration. That won't change the global population trends, but may redistribute the downsides of population decline towards poorer countries. Given most innovation happens in wealthy countries and relatively little in poorer countries even at present, that may delay for longer any negative impact on technological innovation from declining population.
- concordDance 6y ago
  Not just subcultures even! There's probably some people in the 7 billion people on Earth with a mutation that makes them really really want to have children. This mutation will spread like wildfire.
  - beforeolives 6y ago
    This isn't about mutations; it's about economic status, healthcare and education. Wealthier countries consistently have lower birth rates.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Eric Kaufmann, a sociologist, wrote a book on this. It’s called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and basically argues that high birthrate cultures eventually win out against secular childfree or child-limited ones. I find it to be pretty convincing. People tend to create projections of the future based on the current world, which is of course quite limited. Very rarely do we consider the actual cultural background of the “people of the future.”
Roark66 6y ago
I bet many more couples would decide to have children(in developed countries) if it didn't come with high probability of negative health consequences. Specially for older women the risk-reward ratio of having children is highly skewed towards the latter. No surprise women forced to have children by religious and/or societal pressure have more children. Therefore in the long run societies with less freedom out compete more free societies. What we really need is an ability to decouple having children from the physical cost it can have on female body. It would be a great achievement if technology could resolve this issue.
- throwaway59553 6y ago
  "What we really need is an ability to decouple having children from the physical cost it can have on female body. It would be a great achievement if technology could resolve this issue." How do you solve that when society is built around "getting a degree, get a job" first and then think about the children. Speaking for my country, the State always has money for everything that is redundant but there's never money for the basics such affordable housing programs for young couples or kindergardens and all similar institutions to help parents.
  - Isinlor 6y ago
    Is there a single country in the world that increased fertility rate from below replacement rate to above by giving young people anything? In Soviet sphere of influence in Europe there was sudden drop in fertility rate after fall of communism. The fall of communism meant that we went from empty shops and lack of opportunities to full shops and plenty of opportunities. So exact opposite happened to what you predict. Additionally, recently e.g. Polish government introduced very generous child support in a program known as 500+. There is no noticeable change in fertility rate. IMO the biggest reason why women decide to not have children is the perceived opportunity cost. Loosing on studies, career and freedom of being young. Communist countries did not provide young women with opportunities and did not demand high competitiveness, so perceived opportunity cost of having children was a lot lower.
    - 6y ago
armchairhacker 6y ago
"Too few ideas." I don't think this is true. If anything, we might be getting too many people and not enough ideas, as a lot of people are making niche products just so they can invent something. I don't have a good argument to defend this, because there's no way I could predict how civilization, technology, etc. could advance if we had 8 million people instead of 8 billion. But intuitively I just don't see it being much different.
tuatoru 6y ago
The article omits mention of what are to me more important aspects of falling population, at least in the medium run: deflation, and increased investment risk. Deflation: if there is less demand for a product, then the price will fall. Expecting prices to fall, people hold off buying anything as long as possible. Investment risk: With population rising at 1% per year, it doubles in 70 years. This inevitable increase in demand for products reduces the risk of investment: if a town has 1 shoe shop now, it will need 2 shoe shops in 70 years. This underlying increase in demand reduces the risk of investment in new productive assets, and also makes debt repayment easier (future income will be greater than today's). Following the same logic, with falling population financiers will demand higher interest rates on new investment to compensate for the increased risk, and debt will have to be repaid from shrinking income. Contrary to the article, falling investment, rather than lack of ideas, will be the major mechanism by which productivity growth stalls with falling population. There will still be lots of ideas, but they will each have to jump a much higher investment hurdle to be realised. So we'll limp along with minimally maintained, decrepit old capital equipment and systems.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  I don’t see much risk of deflation in that scenario. Falling prices would lead to less production to match. Who is going to keep producing if you can’t make a profit?
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    > Falling prices would lead to less production to match. Eventually, as firms go out of business. The trend arises from the difference between "break even" and "shut down" prices, and consequent delays in the feedback: it takes some years for producer firms to be removed from the market. If prices fall for long enough, the idea of falling prices becomes entrenched in households' planning, making everything worse still.
    - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
      In theory. We’ve had drastically falling prices for computer and communications gear for decades, and it hasn’t stopped people buying.
Jeff_Brown 6y ago
Having fewer children permits a family to invest more in their education. For innovation, educational investment seems likely to matter more than the raw number of people. It's not clear which effect will dominate. That's not to discount policies that make it easier for families to have children. Those are clearly valuable.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/nrT83 https://archive.is/nrT83
rapjr9 6y ago
If the effects of plastics and PFAS/PFOA/PFOS on reproduction are the cause of the fertility decline in richer populations then a fix for those effects (reduced use of plastics, more careful use of plastics, chemistry solutions) could cause a new population explosion. A big IF but a possibility.

69 points by prostoalex 6y ago

"But fewer people may also mean fewer new ideas". May. Or may not. My bet is fewer people mean fewer hours spent watching shit @Netflix and similar.

tim333 6y ago
Yeah us old folk have ideas too!
ThomPete 6y ago
It only require one person to come up with something that transforms society completely. The more people we have to more likely some of them will do that.
- dsnr 6y ago
  I disagree, most of the countries with booming populations are rather poor and don’t do much innovation or research. In the age we live in it’s almost impossible for a lone wolf to fix a big problem of the humankind because of complexities involved. What is necessary instead is team work and funding innovation. Individuals don’t count as much anymore.
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    We need both and that require more not less people.
    - wsc981 6y ago
      > We need both and that require more not less people. A lot of problems would be solved 'automatically' if the world population would be reduced.
      - ThomPete 6y ago
        The world will always face problems and we will always be the victim of these if we don't have the knowledge to combat them. The more people we are the more we are likely to produce the wealth, knowledge and solutions for those problems. The idea that the worlds population is a problem is in my world an antihuman stance which keeps popping up even tough it keeps being proven wrong. Wether Maltahus, Erlich or the UN.
        imtringued 6y ago
        >The idea that the worlds population is a problem is in my world an antihuman stance which keeps popping up even tough it keeps being proven wrong. Wether Maltahus, Erlich or the UN. Ok, I will stay in my pragmatically driven (being in favor of endless population growth is just another ideology, being in favor of neither is pragmatism), non population exploding enclave and become rich in the process. I'll be looking forward to seeing Africa mass produce poor people. Your ideology requires technological progress to always be faster than human population growth, sure you can keep this up another 300 years but at some point you are going to trip.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        You say it's not pragmatic yet history seems to disagree with you. Humans create resources we don't just find them. 300 years from now we are either harvesting the universe or we are just sitting ducks waiting for some giant cataclysmic event. At least my "ideology" gives us a chance where as yours just wait for us to join natures 99.9% extinction rate.
        erik_seaberg 6y ago
        The green revolution narrowly averted catastrophe by modernizing farming worldwide. How could we do that more than once?
        ThomPete 6y ago
        Not sure what you mean. How did the green revolution avert catastrophe?
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >I disagree, most of the countries with booming populations are rather poor and don’t do much innovation or research. That's for different historical reasons than their booming populations. They are still very dynamic economic wise, but have to start from a very low bar. But any country that was ever important had tons of people. Franch and UK and Germany were hugely important globally when they were among the top-5 most populous countries in the world (that was the case back in 19th century). Then the US took that role, and had a good run.
    - throwaway316943 6y ago
      Cause or effect?
      - coldtea 6y ago
        Cause.
- notahacker 6y ago
  We weren't desperately short of ideas when the world population was $1billion and the proportion with education, money and prospects for social advancement was still small. I think we'll cope pretty well with a small drop-off, especially if that's coupled with much of the world getting better prospects at the same time.
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    we are short on knowledge not ideas. We aren't short of resources. More people make us more wealthy which gives us better chance of creating more knowledge.
  - chr1 6y ago
    One thing to consider is that the sciene problems we have to solve now are much harder than what we had to deal with 200 years ago at 1 billion population. You are correct that what matters is mostly the population living in soceities organized well enough for their inhabitants to have better prospects. But sadly becoming a country with "better prospects" is not a simple thing. In fact, population decreasing in rich western countries, has a rather deleterious effect on the poor countries. I being from a third world country see everyday how people who could help to fix my country end up emigrating because rich countries need more people. So it's not at all clear whether much of the world getting better prospects will compensate for population decreasing, or much of the world will get worse prospects because of population decreasing.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  It only require one person to come up with something that transforms society completely I hear this a lot, in the context of, we must keep growing the global population on the off chance that someone may be born who comes up with a way to live on an over-populated, polluted, resource-depleted planet. It's nonsense.
  - chr1 6y ago
    Is Netherlands an overpopulated and polluted country? It is one of the best countries i have seen and its population density is 10 times higher than world average, so we can have 70 billion people living on earth without even discovering anything new. As for resource depletion, 3.5 vs 7 billion people doesn't make that much difference, both are more than earth can support naturally without us constantly finding new ways to obtain resources. After all the largest extinctions we have caused so far were megafauna extinctions 10k years ago and we managed to do that with just a few millions of people.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    >I hear this a lot, in the context of, we must keep growing the global population on the off chance that someone may be born who comes up with a way to live on an over-populated, polluted, resource-depleted planet. It's nonsense. Standards of living globally are better than at any time in the past, yet in spite of the continued failed predictions of disaster people have been making for the past couple hundred years, people still persist in making such predictions. Willfully ignoring humanity's ability to adapt and overcome, that's the real nonsense.
    - antisthenes 6y ago
      The first part of it is nonsense - quantity of people does not translate into quality and innovation automatically. You have to free people from drudgery and spend tons on their education, and provide them with a stable environment in which to work, and cultural encouragement for the parents to nourish children's curiosity. Only then can you hope to generate ideas that surpass our already quite formidable body of knowledge, and it's still not guaranteed. > yet in spite of the continued failed predictions of disaster people have been making for the past couple hundred years, people still persist in making such predictions. They only have to be right once. On a geological time scale, a disaster is certainly inevitable. Not that I necessarily agree with doomsaying all the time. Population growth isn't the biggest issue we're facing.
- PicassoCTs 6y ago
  Ideas are like sand at an ocean beach. But paths to a working implementation are rare. And by now mined by great companies with patent lawyers, to prevent disruption. If you are big and successful, new ideas are the poison.The only vector for new idea implementations to make it big, is other behemoths want to eat old behemoths. Apple/Android eating Kodak. The individual does rarely factor into that. Unless s/he knows how to move giants into funny game constellations. Which becomes ever less likely, as most giants today are owned by pension funds, who prefer stability over change. Contrary what the propaganda tells us, nobody wants ideas, nobody wants change, not even those trying to emulate market capitalism to prevent political backlash. Which makes ideas worse then worthless. Its something the "No-Future"-coporate-cartel will come down upon you for.
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    Which is why the more people we have to work on the problem the better. The individuals DO factor into that but it require a framework the individuals best suited for solving these problems can work within which allow them to spend the time needed to create the knowledge to solve the problems which requires wealth which require growth i.e. requires society (i.e. us)
- coldtea 6y ago
  >It only require one person to come up with something that transforms society completely Progress takes many people working together to shape ideas and build things. And an aging society would be less inclined to change and adopt it, run by more older people resistant to some new idea, and have less young people with the dynamism to put such idea in action even if it was adopted.
  - throwaway316943 6y ago
    An older, more experienced population may be less inclined to chase the latest new trend but they are better able to weigh the merits of new ideas against the harms they may induce and will generally do a better job of applying existing and new technology to the problem at hand. Experience and knowledge count for a lot and the vitality of youth is often wasted on the young.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >An older, more experienced population may be less inclined to chase the latest new trend but they are better able to weigh the merits of new ideas against the harms they may induce Theoritically. In practice they're more concerned with their own mortality, and weighing the merits of some new diet or therapy for hemmorhoids or some such...
nathias 6y ago
Not really, it means fewer new ideas if all other factors are the same. Of course, education, creativity and means to extract this ideas count as well.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Well, education and creativity will also decline in an aging population.
  - nathias 6y ago
    For the aged people yes, but not for populations, there could be an increase of education and creativity that would offset the natural decline.

BelenusMordred 6y ago

Always thought the unspoken onus is on OP to provide a non-paywalled link. Here's the full article from a week ago: https://archive.is/937Dt https://archive.is/937Dt > a recent paper inspired by their book, by Charles Jones, an economist at Stanford University, argues that over the long run any positive economic effects that come from a shrinking population may be cancelled out by the reduction in humankind’s creative capacity. If ideas drive growth and people are the source of ideas, he writes, then the fate of our species depends crucially on long-run population trends We have more creatives than we can already handle, more talented PhD scientists, researchers and engineers than a dozen Earths can afford to fund. In the face of relentless environmental degradation, greenhouse pollution and a scientific consensus that our planets sixth great extinction event occurring right now is solely caused by humans, how can anyone make statements like this with a straight face? Energy and resource exploitation is rising rapidly in the developing world, were they to consume as much per person as the West overnight the planet would be ruined very quickly.

chrisco255 6y ago
Really? How so? Is the west irreparably ruined? Still seems quite livable in 2021. National forest ecosystems are quite healthy. Environmental protections are actually enforced here. Conservation is properly funded. Seems like this is not true in developing countries.
- jbergens 6y ago
  The west uses more resources per capita than the world as a whole. If all parts would try to use as much the resources would not be enough. We might deplate the food resources, oil, gas and also cause irreparable damage to the environment.
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    The west also invented many of these resources. Before we found ways to turn them into resources they were useless. You are following the same line of reasoning we heard about how the earth couldnt sustain 4 billion, 5 billion, yet here we are wealthier, safer, more numerous than ever because we found ways to transform completely useless materials into valuable resources.

stereolambda 6y ago

For beyond the population peak, these guys forecast too far ahead for their predictions to be realistic (there will be unknown confounding factors along the way). The "too few ideas" claim is also weird. For you to contribute some ideas to the global economy, at the very least you need some access to capital, that currently most of the world doesn't have. Having good education and some freedom from spending all time and all your energy just to survive on subsistence level also helps. In production of ideas, lifting people everywhere to the Western middle class standard of living and mindset is far more important than raw population count. This would probably require bringing industrial labor wages to a more realistic level everywhere, also in poorer countries. The whole system of relying on cheap labor in developing countries would have to change somewhat with decelerating population. The stuff in the West would be more expensive, although maybe with fewer workers wages couldn't be so stagnant. The model of buying materials and labor cheap somewhere and selling stuff highish to Western population would be harder to sustain, making many businesses less viable. Maybe this is especially scary for people that are heavily into capital. This is my personal take and it's somewhat related to the post-Black Death phenomena in Europe that the article mentions. There's also "The Great Demographic Reversal" book where the authors apparently also predict rising inflation and take into account aging of the population (I've only watched an interview with one of the authors).

eru 6y ago
> The whole system of relying on cheap labor in developing countries would have to change somewhat with decelerating population. The stuff in the West would be more expensive, although maybe with fewer workers wages couldn't be so stagnant. I don't think so. Lots of stuff we consume in the west is made in China. Chinese wages have gone up like crazy in the last few decades. (Not that they are particularly high now, they just used to be sooo low.) Yet, stuff hasn't gotten more expensive for us. The causality runs the other way: Wages go up when productivity goes up. Productivity going up in China means they can make more with less work. So if anything, the proportion of the price in our cheap imported stuff that goes towards labour costs tends to fall as Chinese labour gets more productive.
- starfallg 6y ago

yhoiseth 6y ago

Scale by Geoffrey West and Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo both support on the idea that we need a lot of people to have a high standard of living. They come at it from different angles, but agree that (large) social networks are crucial for the generation and execution of ideas.

imtringued 6y ago
It is entirely possible that taking our current society and rearranging it will produce more total output than simply adding more people.

skissane 6y ago

I think in the long-run, natural selection will prefer subcultures with higher birth rates, and through that population growth will eventually start rising again. Many of those subcultures are growing exponentially, but coming off quite a low base, so in most countries it is going to take decades, even a century or two, to see the impact at the national and global levels. (Some countries will be seeing it sooner than others–witness the growth of the ultra-Orthodox sector in Israel.) It will be a rather different population, likely more religious and more conservative, considering that many of the subcultures with higher birth rates are conservative religious subcultures – and, the more conservative and religious a group is, the higher their birth rate tends to be. A society dominated by religious conservatives may produce a slower rate of technological innovation as much as one with a more secular but declining population does. On the other hand, there will always be defections – even highly insular groups such as Old Order Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews can still have a 5-20% defection rate, and with less insular groups the defection rate tends to be higher – and those defections will help replenish the secular component of the population. Another factor to note, is that many wealthy countries are avoiding population decline through immigration. That won't change the global population trends, but may redistribute the downsides of population decline towards poorer countries. Given most innovation happens in wealthy countries and relatively little in poorer countries even at present, that may delay for longer any negative impact on technological innovation from declining population.

concordDance 6y ago
Not just subcultures even! There's probably some people in the 7 billion people on Earth with a mutation that makes them really really want to have children. This mutation will spread like wildfire.
- beforeolives 6y ago
  This isn't about mutations; it's about economic status, healthcare and education. Wealthier countries consistently have lower birth rates.
keiferski 6y ago
Eric Kaufmann, a sociologist, wrote a book on this. It’s called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and basically argues that high birthrate cultures eventually win out against secular childfree or child-limited ones. I find it to be pretty convincing. People tend to create projections of the future based on the current world, which is of course quite limited. Very rarely do we consider the actual cultural background of the “people of the future.”

Roark66 6y ago

I bet many more couples would decide to have children(in developed countries) if it didn't come with high probability of negative health consequences. Specially for older women the risk-reward ratio of having children is highly skewed towards the latter. No surprise women forced to have children by religious and/or societal pressure have more children. Therefore in the long run societies with less freedom out compete more free societies. What we really need is an ability to decouple having children from the physical cost it can have on female body. It would be a great achievement if technology could resolve this issue.

throwaway59553 6y ago
"What we really need is an ability to decouple having children from the physical cost it can have on female body. It would be a great achievement if technology could resolve this issue." How do you solve that when society is built around "getting a degree, get a job" first and then think about the children. Speaking for my country, the State always has money for everything that is redundant but there's never money for the basics such affordable housing programs for young couples or kindergardens and all similar institutions to help parents.
- Isinlor 6y ago
  Is there a single country in the world that increased fertility rate from below replacement rate to above by giving young people anything? In Soviet sphere of influence in Europe there was sudden drop in fertility rate after fall of communism. The fall of communism meant that we went from empty shops and lack of opportunities to full shops and plenty of opportunities. So exact opposite happened to what you predict. Additionally, recently e.g. Polish government introduced very generous child support in a program known as 500+. There is no noticeable change in fertility rate. IMO the biggest reason why women decide to not have children is the perceived opportunity cost. Loosing on studies, career and freedom of being young. Communist countries did not provide young women with opportunities and did not demand high competitiveness, so perceived opportunity cost of having children was a lot lower.
  - 6y ago

armchairhacker 6y ago

"Too few ideas." I don't think this is true. If anything, we might be getting too many people and not enough ideas, as a lot of people are making niche products just so they can invent something. I don't have a good argument to defend this, because there's no way I could predict how civilization, technology, etc. could advance if we had 8 million people instead of 8 billion. But intuitively I just don't see it being much different.

tuatoru 6y ago

The article omits mention of what are to me more important aspects of falling population, at least in the medium run: deflation, and increased investment risk. Deflation: if there is less demand for a product, then the price will fall. Expecting prices to fall, people hold off buying anything as long as possible. Investment risk: With population rising at 1% per year, it doubles in 70 years. This inevitable increase in demand for products reduces the risk of investment: if a town has 1 shoe shop now, it will need 2 shoe shops in 70 years. This underlying increase in demand reduces the risk of investment in new productive assets, and also makes debt repayment easier (future income will be greater than today's). Following the same logic, with falling population financiers will demand higher interest rates on new investment to compensate for the increased risk, and debt will have to be repaid from shrinking income. Contrary to the article, falling investment, rather than lack of ideas, will be the major mechanism by which productivity growth stalls with falling population. There will still be lots of ideas, but they will each have to jump a much higher investment hurdle to be realised. So we'll limp along with minimally maintained, decrepit old capital equipment and systems.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago
I don’t see much risk of deflation in that scenario. Falling prices would lead to less production to match. Who is going to keep producing if you can’t make a profit?
- tuatoru 6y ago
  > Falling prices would lead to less production to match. Eventually, as firms go out of business. The trend arises from the difference between "break even" and "shut down" prices, and consequent delays in the feedback: it takes some years for producer firms to be removed from the market. If prices fall for long enough, the idea of falling prices becomes entrenched in households' planning, making everything worse still.
  - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    In theory. We’ve had drastically falling prices for computer and communications gear for decades, and it hasn’t stopped people buying.

Jeff_Brown 6y ago

Having fewer children permits a family to invest more in their education. For innovation, educational investment seems likely to matter more than the raw number of people. It's not clear which effect will dominate. That's not to discount policies that make it easier for families to have children. Those are clearly valuable.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/nrT83 https://archive.is/nrT83

rapjr9 6y ago

If the effects of plastics and PFAS/PFOA/PFOS on reproduction are the cause of the fertility decline in richer populations then a fix for those effects (reduced use of plastics, more careful use of plastics, chemistry solutions) could cause a new population explosion. A big IF but a possibility.