11 ms·

U.S. Population Growth, an Economic Driver, Grinds to a Halt

53 points by NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

pepperonipizza 5y ago
Can we achieve prosperity without economic growth? Because at a point, we sure can't have prosperity with continuous population growth.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  Prosperity needs growth per capita. Population growth expands general demand and markets, and really sustains some industries (construction, for instance), but is not sustainable, indeed. If population growth stalls or even if population shrinks then the overall economic output will do the same. But IMHO that is not important, what is important for people is the economic output per capita and as such I think it's possible for people's lives to continue to improve.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    Most first world countries have an infatuation with construction and property that seems unsustainable, especially as property prices rise and land ownership continues consolidating up the economic ladder. A few countries have caught themselves in a bubble, and my country in particular (Australia) does everything it can to make sure it doesn't pop. There are numerous government grants for home-buyers, every time we have a financial crisis it's the construction and banking industries that get all the grants and bailouts, and even during the various COVID lockdowns there have been schemes to prop up construction. Government and council platforms are almost always based around construction projects, rarely reform or social programs. I get why, without these schemes, the house of cards would come falling down. But at some point endless construction will have to slow down, and we'll need to make a more sustainable relationship with construction and property.
  - MrPatan 5y ago
    Wars are won with absolute resources, not per capita resources
- bamboozled 5y ago
  My theory is that we cannot because we don't share and prosper together. We have "trickle down" economics, which IMO means current economic incentives are pyramid shaped. In order for the pyramid to grow in size, the people at the top consonantly need more people at the bottom, consuming, to keep it growing. If the economy was "rounder" and more directly beneficial to everyone, it would be less necessary to have more consumers / population growth.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    I don't think that is the whole story because the shape of that pyramid varies considerably from country to country.
    - bamboozled 5y ago
      Why would that description not apply in America? It seems to have huge wealth inequality ?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- ben_w 5y ago
  In principle, but if economic growth is still physically possible then anyone trying to stall it within their zone of political influence just gives relative power to those who don’t.
- dsign 5y ago
  > Can we achieve prosperity without economic growth? It's extremely difficult. Progress is almost always related to new products and services. Imagine developing those under the constraint of no economic growth. "We can't grow economically, so we can't develop this new vaccine unless we close all the coffee shops in town." > Because at a point, we sure can't have prosperity with continuous population growth. That's a different thing. In theory, one can have economic growth without population growth, at least for a time and in certain range. The economists call it "productivity"[1]; it measures how big is the lever that each worker uses to produce. I guess that we could, with the current population of Earth, have sustained economic growth without population growth for centuries, just by equalizing-up productivity across all population sectors and countries. With that said, even the current human population of Earth is quite a stress on the planet. In the best world, we would find more and better places to live, so that we can leave our planet be and have the freedom to have families as big or small as we like. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity
lkrubner 5y ago
One need that comes up, over and over again, is the need for community and family support: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201301/new-moms-need-social-support https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201... Therefore some of the things that we've done in an effort to make the economy more innovative has probably made it more difficult for anyone to have children. In particular, allowing the better paying jobs to concentrate into a few dozen cities means that many people now face the painful choice, either they stay in their home region, where they would have support raising a family, or they move to one of those cities, where they can have a good paying career, but where they will lack support. Outside of a few dozen affluent cities wages have been falling to such an extent that low paying jobs have had less and less attraction for poorer women. Women's participation in the labor force hit its peak in the late 1990s and has been in decline since 2000. Many families are simply working less and therefore contracting their standard of living. (Obviously, we need less money if we are willing to live with less. In particular, we've seen the re-emergence of multi-generational households, something that had largely disappeared during the affluent years of the early and mid 20th Century). There have been many cultural changes that make it impossible for us to ever get back to anything like Baby Boom levels of children. For instance, the impact of high levels of divorce: https://www.workingmother.com/single-moms-you-need-support-system-heres-how-to-create-it https://www.workingmother.com/single-moms-you-need-support-s... There was also the backlash against government services, in all of the Western democracies after 1980 (give or take a few years depending on the country) which taught a whole generation of parents that a given program, offering crucial support, might suddenly be withdrawn, and that generation of parents taught their children to be wary of depending too much on any source of support which might suddenly disappear. But it's worth considering, the world is over-populated, so in many ways it is terrific that people are having less children. Less children means that 100 years from now there will be less strain on the environment. We simply need to be willing to adjust to slower economic growth.
- dlkmp 5y ago
  >Less children means that 100 years from now there will be less strain on the environment Population growth is influenced by other factors than reproduction, namely immigration. I don't think it makes much sense to consider the environnmental aspect of population growth on a national level.
dominotw 5y ago
Great news. we already have 7 billion+ ppl on the planet. Can we let other species breath for a few seconds. Screw the 'economic driver' and scaremongering.
- falcrist 5y ago
  This is just population growth in the US. It continues to grow elsewhere. As Hans Rosling pointed out, children are sort of migrating to poorer areas of the world where fertility rates are still high.
  - dominotw 5y ago
    well its at-least something. poorer areas have lower carbon print so this is better than nothing.
  - wobbly_bush 5y ago
    > This is just population growth in the US. It continues to grow elsewhere. The fertility rates are dropping everywhere, specially in populous countries like India and China. So the trend is similar worldwide.
    - falcrist 5y ago
      Fertility rate and population growth aren't the same thing. Population growth is also influenced by life expectancy and immigration/emmigration. I can also assure you that population growth trends are NOT the same everywhere. The West is approaching a new equilibrium, but places like Africa are still seeing tons of growth. I really encourage everyone to look up Hans Rosling on youtube. His lectures are highly informative and easy to follow.
felixfbecker 5y ago
Immigration was also halted.
lalaland1125 5y ago
One underrated reason for this is the decline in religion among the youth. Gen Z and Millennials are two of the least religious generations ever in the US, with Gen Z being roughly 50% irreligious. This has a huge impact because the birth rates for irreligious people are very low. The total fertility rate in the US for irreligious women is only 1.4 children per woman compared to 2.2 children per woman for religious women. The fundamental issue here is incentives. Raising children is a lot of work and a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive.
- eecc 5y ago
  Of course. The drive to have a child has nothing to do with economic stability and access to affordable housing, health care, food, schooling and the ability to have a good enough work/life balance that allows a parent to actually participate to the children’s education and development. No, no, it’s about this hedonistic godless culture that’s eating away at our “precious bodily fluids”. Bah… never expected such a comment here
  - Ygg2 5y ago
    Look at Africa. Lower economic and social stability. Higher fertility rates. I'm not sure if this is as another commenter points out due to "private old folks care" or due to the sheer survivability. Any species in dangerous environments has more offsprings than in less dangerous environments.
    - Ajay-p 5y ago
      Making babies reminds me of the meth epidemic: When you have no economic or social stability, no jobs, no education, and consequently no hope, sex like drugs becomes an escape.
  - lalaland1125 5y ago
    Look at comparator countries in the EU with much better scores in all of those factors. Almost all of those countries are also suffering from declining birth rates as secularism increases. Most have much lower birth rates than the US. You could also look at the minimal long term fertility effects of pro birth legislation [1]. The material factors don't seem to be driving birth rates as much as many people seem to think. 1. https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-uncle-sam-boost-american-fertility https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-uncle-sam-boost-american-fert...
spoonjim 5y ago
One of the most troubling things about the decline in population growth is that the most educated people, and in my experience the most "planning-oriented" people in that group, are the ones least likely to have kids. This means that the people most equipped to tackle long-term problems are supplying the fewest number of children with their genes and values into the population, which will cause our electoral politics to be increasingly dominated by the uneducated and the impulsive.
- watwut 5y ago
  Too much of "planning-orientation" clashes with kids anyway.
- NavinF 5y ago
  https://xkcd.com/603/ https://xkcd.com/603/
- mtrovo 5y ago
  Only if we had better methods of allowing social mobility and selecting the best among us that wouldnt involve which family you came from. /s On a more serious note I really believe that only the "poor hustlers" strata of society is not having kids, i.e couples that have good jobs but would be poor if any of them stopped working, so they have a dog for now and pretend they will have kids after they're 40. If you go up on the ladder you probably don't have the same growth problem, take N=1 Ellon Musk with 7 kids as example. Reminds me of how having real animals on Blade Runner was a privilege of the ultra rich :).
  - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
    There is a strong connection between genetics and IQ.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ur-whale 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
yobbo 5y ago
> The economy of the developed world for the last two centuries now has been built on demographic expansion It would be extremely difficult to establish this causation to some level that can be trusted. The causation is likely; economic growth > jobs > families > births.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Or: https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-american-women-delaying-motherhood-because-1847112786 https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-american-women-delaying...
- MrPatan 5y ago
  Causation typically goes forward in time
thefz 5y ago
We cannot strive for a continuous growth of the population since the earth's resources are finite. Someday we will have to stop, or regress; it's just that every generation does not want to be the one with more retirements and pensions over the shoulders of the working class.
- nights192 5y ago
  Alternatively, we may become an interstellar species and circumvent these problems for an entirely different set. I find it unfortunate that our milieu's become so thoroughly pessimistic as to the continued, unbounded prosperity of our race--I feel as though it engenders a sort of defeatism.
  - pizza234 5y ago
    Resources availability is only one factor in the bigger picture - sustainability. Without sustainable politics/culture, the population will need endlessly to new locations. Space colonization would just postpone the need.
  - j-pb 5y ago
    Space has at most cubed resources relative to time (we can only explore a sphere assuming non arbitrary FTL travel). Population growth is exponential. Even with space as a resource the math doesn't work out. You'd just keep the pyramid scheme running for a few hundred years with the 1% elite inhabiting earth, and the current cheap workforce of the third world inhabiting the astroid belt.
  - Comevius 5y ago
    It's important to be realistic. We are not an interstellar species, we build infrastructure for cars and we can't even afford the maintenance bill on it. Even in space we could not afford an exponential growth. You would want to pace yourself before you can afford to reach other stars, then other galaxies. Eventually there will be nowhere to run.
    - zpeti 5y ago
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The economy of the developed world for the last two centuries now has been built on demographic expansion No, demographic expansion has been a side effect of technological development, which has also been the basis of the economy. That's been true not only in the two centuries and change since the first industrial revolution, but its also been true for the hundred centuries or so since the first agricultural revolution. That's kind of been petering off recently, the most obvious conclusion being that it is because agricultural and industrial capacity is no longer the limit on population, so continued development isn't fueling further growth.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  I think both are true. If no technological progress happens, but the productive workforce is 1% bigger each year, cet par you expect a 1% GDP growth - 1% more stuff being made etc. But sure, we can move on from that. At one point, the strength of a nation was counted in coal and sulphuric acid output, and investing in factories was all the rage.
- zhdc1 5y ago
  > demographic expansion has been a side effect of technological development There was also a cultural side to it. Instead of being a linear relationships, it's more that technological development removed a population bottleneck and antiquated old family planning practices. Population growth is iirc highest in agricultural areas that experience significant increases in health care access and overall life expectancy. Instead of having to have 6-8+ children to ensure that 1-2 male heirs live to adulthood, suddenly you're faced with the burden of having to care and feed for every single child until they become self sufficient. This eventually drives the birth rate down to an economically sustainable level.
jti107 5y ago
my brother just had twins and he told me it was gonna be $1000/month for daycare once they are 1-2 years old. and thats just for daycare...if you want to know why people aren't having kids, its because they are too expensive.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Market signals communicating that your job must compensate very well if you expect someone else to watch your kids while you work.
kypro 5y ago
I wish we stopped focusing so much on the overall economy growing every year and more on individuals having a "richer" quality of life. In the last few decades we've seen significant economic growth, yet people are living in smaller and smaller apartments, struggling with debt, living cities that are overpopulated and crowded, while economists try to assure us we're richer today, both from a GDP standpoint and a GDP per capita. It certainly doesn't feel like we're richer to me. A world that's less crowded and where you can afford a nice house with a garden on a single income would IMO be better than having a couple more zeros in my bank balance. We wonder why births are so low in the West, but when you're living in a 1 bed apartment and have $50,000 of debt you're not exactly going to be keen to introduce more financial problems into your life by having a kid. We see this play out in the UK with the working-class having significantly more kids because for them in many cases it actually benefits them financially to do so. Our priorities seem wrong as a society. We're looking at metrics to optimise business health instead of personal health. We're using immigration to prop on the population while not asking why people in the society feel they're unable to have children. I think when people criticise capitalism what they're really annoyed about is this. Why are our politicians so focused business health and not on ours? Why can't we afford to buy a nice home on a single income and have money left over to raise a family? I keep hearing how people want to live in apartments in the city, go into debt and uni and don't want kids, but what choice do we have? These days we literally need to go to uni and live in small apartments in a city where we have no friends or family just to get a good job. And if we're really lucky we might have enough money for a kid by the time we're 35.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.md/GsNcf https://archive.md/GsNcf
Ajay-p 5y ago
The article seems to posit that immigration is the only way for American population to continue to grow, but I am not convinced population growth is desirable. My family comes from a place where population growth has exceeded resources. Instead of encouraging population growth, might it be wiser to reinvest in population efficiency and productivity?
- charwalker 5y ago
  Planet Money (NPR) ran a segment in 2018 related to Trumps promise of growing GDP by 3-5%+. They theorized 3 ways to do so with one being "...double our immigrant population over the next decade". Import people, they take jobs and spend money to grow GDP. Another option was delay retirement by about 10 years or work to 73 to expand the labor force and continue keeping people employed past (or into more) peak earning years. More income = more spending = higher GDP. Or, force labor participation to pull those out of the workforce in. And the third option was to enable 2 side by side dot-com capital purchasing booms or develop a new technology (like desktop/personal computers) that enables spending capital and increasing worker productivity at 2x the rate during the dot-com boom. Between those 3 options, immigration is a clear winner. We have the space though we need to invest in infrastructure/schools to build it out. The jobs are mostly there esp. after the last 4 years drove immigration, legal or not, way down. We trashed the Irish, Italians, Polish, Chinese, even put Japanese into internment camps about 70 years back before normalizing most of those groups into American Culture (at least in decent parts of the country). A taco truck on every corner is just a new variation of the American Dream. Immigrant turned small business owner/employer making a buck off the entrenched population to buy (or build) a home with 2 car garage and a covered section for the truck itself, maybe an RV down the line. 100 year old research by Thomas on Polish immigrants shows it takes less than 3 generations for an immigrant family to follow local customs, language, and other norms. In 40-60 years we'll be a more robust, wealthier, stronger nation thanks to a taco truck on every corner. Thomas has an odd career (and love life) but did develop a few neat theorems including how immigrants become part of the local culture over just a few short generations. His Thomas Theorem, "if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.", is not only profound but evergreen. How one interprets the situation will alter ones reaction like an oncologist always seeing cancer or a network admin always faulting DNS (usually correctly so). We have a sect of the US population that considers election meddling/fraud and more as real although experts, leaders, and many more note how insane those conspiracy theories are. But they are real in their consequences with immense division on topics as straightforward as vaccinations or the existence of the pandemic. It's kid of silly how even as technology advances, people stay pretty much the same. In large groups we're still just monkeys with quality tools. Planet Money Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/531956234 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/531956234 Thomas and the Polish Peasant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polish_Peasant_in_Europe_and_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polish_Peasant_in_Europe_a...
lamontcg 5y ago
Tax billionaires out of existence, free college, free health care, limit investment in rental properties and do away with vast chunks of zoning laws. Stop forcing Americans to life all their life to pay off their debt and making children expensive luxuries that only the rich can afford. (And I can already feel the aneurysm I just gave half the people on this forum)
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Children are expensive luxuries. Why would you subsidize them when there are 7.4B people in the world, with population momentum on track to arrive at 10B near the end of the century? Subsidized higher education, universal healthcare, and higher taxes on the wealthiest are still all fine ideas, ideas I fully support. But the world needs less people regardless of those policies. We overshot global carrying capacity, and you can't socialized economic system your way out of that.
  - OzyM 5y ago
    Generally speaking, the highest birth rates aren't in the types of counties overrepresented on HN. Our best shot for reducing the global birth rate is improving education in developing nations (particularly women's education[0]), improving access to contraception, and reducing child mortality. I agree socializing developed nations' economic systems isn't having a huge effect on the global population growth. Focusing on the real problem means investing in the health & development of those with the actual highest birthrates, not making U.S. colleges cheaper. [0] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility.pdf https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-educati...
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Birth rates are a component, but so is per capita environmental impact. Lower total fertility rates everywhere are welcome [1], but if one were to prioritize efforts, you'd focus on highest per capita environmental impact (whether that be CO2 emissions, consumption beyond replenishment rate of natural resources, etc). I'll go so far as to say that empowering women through education and family planning access alone in some countries isn't enough; you might have to provide direct cash payments to assist in developing agency through career development or entrepreneurial efforts. Otherwise, from my research [2] [3], they're beholden to their partner's family wishes (which may not align with their own, and they may not have the safety or security to assert their will). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/ https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/ [2] https://theconversation.com/family-size-why-some-nigerian-men-want-more-children-159692 https://theconversation.com/family-size-why-some-nigerian-me... ("Family size: why some Nigerian men want more children") [3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/africa-s-population-will-soar-dangerously-unless-women-are-more-empowered/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/africa-s-populati... ("Men also have to relinquish sole control over the decision to have children and refrain from abusing wives or partners who seek birth control.")
game_the0ry 5y ago
I knew that article would mention immigration. Here's the gist: * older people people favor policy that benefits themselves by sacrificing their kids * young people have been economically tapped out and have lost confidence in supporting a family, thus wont have children * population declines across the developed world [1] * "elites" see writing on the wall and rightly anticipate economic decline * elites and owners of assets (who are typically older) advocate for more favorable policies for themselves (lower wealth taxes, lower inheritance tax, NIMBY-isms) while also advocating for more immigration to keep labor costs down and population growth up * young people get squeezed (again) with the double whammy of stagnant wages and high housing costs And thus the US is set up for an ugly political war between: * young vs old * those who do not own assets vs asset owners * anti-establishment vs establishment * socialism vs capitalism * closed borders vs open borders * etc Which is playing out as we speak. [1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2019/
mikewarot 5y ago
Productivity per non-farm worker has gone up steadily in the United States. [1] As we keep becoming more productive, the economy will continue to grow, even without any change in overall population. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

53 points by NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

Can we achieve prosperity without economic growth? Because at a point, we sure can't have prosperity with continuous population growth.

mytailorisrich 5y ago
Prosperity needs growth per capita. Population growth expands general demand and markets, and really sustains some industries (construction, for instance), but is not sustainable, indeed. If population growth stalls or even if population shrinks then the overall economic output will do the same. But IMHO that is not important, what is important for people is the economic output per capita and as such I think it's possible for people's lives to continue to improve.
- ehnto 5y ago
  Most first world countries have an infatuation with construction and property that seems unsustainable, especially as property prices rise and land ownership continues consolidating up the economic ladder. A few countries have caught themselves in a bubble, and my country in particular (Australia) does everything it can to make sure it doesn't pop. There are numerous government grants for home-buyers, every time we have a financial crisis it's the construction and banking industries that get all the grants and bailouts, and even during the various COVID lockdowns there have been schemes to prop up construction. Government and council platforms are almost always based around construction projects, rarely reform or social programs. I get why, without these schemes, the house of cards would come falling down. But at some point endless construction will have to slow down, and we'll need to make a more sustainable relationship with construction and property.
- MrPatan 5y ago
  Wars are won with absolute resources, not per capita resources
bamboozled 5y ago
My theory is that we cannot because we don't share and prosper together. We have "trickle down" economics, which IMO means current economic incentives are pyramid shaped. In order for the pyramid to grow in size, the people at the top consonantly need more people at the bottom, consuming, to keep it growing. If the economy was "rounder" and more directly beneficial to everyone, it would be less necessary to have more consumers / population growth.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I don't think that is the whole story because the shape of that pyramid varies considerably from country to country.
  - bamboozled 5y ago
    Why would that description not apply in America? It seems to have huge wealth inequality ?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
ben_w 5y ago
In principle, but if economic growth is still physically possible then anyone trying to stall it within their zone of political influence just gives relative power to those who don’t.
dsign 5y ago
> Can we achieve prosperity without economic growth? It's extremely difficult. Progress is almost always related to new products and services. Imagine developing those under the constraint of no economic growth. "We can't grow economically, so we can't develop this new vaccine unless we close all the coffee shops in town." > Because at a point, we sure can't have prosperity with continuous population growth. That's a different thing. In theory, one can have economic growth without population growth, at least for a time and in certain range. The economists call it "productivity"[1]; it measures how big is the lever that each worker uses to produce. I guess that we could, with the current population of Earth, have sustained economic growth without population growth for centuries, just by equalizing-up productivity across all population sectors and countries. With that said, even the current human population of Earth is quite a stress on the planet. In the best world, we would find more and better places to live, so that we can leave our planet be and have the freedom to have families as big or small as we like. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity

lkrubner 5y ago

One need that comes up, over and over again, is the need for community and family support: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201301/new-moms-need-social-support https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201... Therefore some of the things that we've done in an effort to make the economy more innovative has probably made it more difficult for anyone to have children. In particular, allowing the better paying jobs to concentrate into a few dozen cities means that many people now face the painful choice, either they stay in their home region, where they would have support raising a family, or they move to one of those cities, where they can have a good paying career, but where they will lack support. Outside of a few dozen affluent cities wages have been falling to such an extent that low paying jobs have had less and less attraction for poorer women. Women's participation in the labor force hit its peak in the late 1990s and has been in decline since 2000. Many families are simply working less and therefore contracting their standard of living. (Obviously, we need less money if we are willing to live with less. In particular, we've seen the re-emergence of multi-generational households, something that had largely disappeared during the affluent years of the early and mid 20th Century). There have been many cultural changes that make it impossible for us to ever get back to anything like Baby Boom levels of children. For instance, the impact of high levels of divorce: https://www.workingmother.com/single-moms-you-need-support-system-heres-how-to-create-it https://www.workingmother.com/single-moms-you-need-support-s... There was also the backlash against government services, in all of the Western democracies after 1980 (give or take a few years depending on the country) which taught a whole generation of parents that a given program, offering crucial support, might suddenly be withdrawn, and that generation of parents taught their children to be wary of depending too much on any source of support which might suddenly disappear. But it's worth considering, the world is over-populated, so in many ways it is terrific that people are having less children. Less children means that 100 years from now there will be less strain on the environment. We simply need to be willing to adjust to slower economic growth.

dlkmp 5y ago
>Less children means that 100 years from now there will be less strain on the environment Population growth is influenced by other factors than reproduction, namely immigration. I don't think it makes much sense to consider the environnmental aspect of population growth on a national level.

dominotw 5y ago

Great news. we already have 7 billion+ ppl on the planet. Can we let other species breath for a few seconds. Screw the 'economic driver' and scaremongering.

falcrist 5y ago
This is just population growth in the US. It continues to grow elsewhere. As Hans Rosling pointed out, children are sort of migrating to poorer areas of the world where fertility rates are still high.
- dominotw 5y ago
  well its at-least something. poorer areas have lower carbon print so this is better than nothing.
- wobbly_bush 5y ago
  > This is just population growth in the US. It continues to grow elsewhere. The fertility rates are dropping everywhere, specially in populous countries like India and China. So the trend is similar worldwide.
  - falcrist 5y ago
    Fertility rate and population growth aren't the same thing. Population growth is also influenced by life expectancy and immigration/emmigration. I can also assure you that population growth trends are NOT the same everywhere. The West is approaching a new equilibrium, but places like Africa are still seeing tons of growth. I really encourage everyone to look up Hans Rosling on youtube. His lectures are highly informative and easy to follow.

felixfbecker 5y ago

Immigration was also halted.

lalaland1125 5y ago

One underrated reason for this is the decline in religion among the youth. Gen Z and Millennials are two of the least religious generations ever in the US, with Gen Z being roughly 50% irreligious. This has a huge impact because the birth rates for irreligious people are very low. The total fertility rate in the US for irreligious women is only 1.4 children per woman compared to 2.2 children per woman for religious women. The fundamental issue here is incentives. Raising children is a lot of work and a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive.

eecc 5y ago
Of course. The drive to have a child has nothing to do with economic stability and access to affordable housing, health care, food, schooling and the ability to have a good enough work/life balance that allows a parent to actually participate to the children’s education and development. No, no, it’s about this hedonistic godless culture that’s eating away at our “precious bodily fluids”. Bah… never expected such a comment here
- Ygg2 5y ago
  Look at Africa. Lower economic and social stability. Higher fertility rates. I'm not sure if this is as another commenter points out due to "private old folks care" or due to the sheer survivability. Any species in dangerous environments has more offsprings than in less dangerous environments.
  - Ajay-p 5y ago
    Making babies reminds me of the meth epidemic: When you have no economic or social stability, no jobs, no education, and consequently no hope, sex like drugs becomes an escape.
- lalaland1125 5y ago
  Look at comparator countries in the EU with much better scores in all of those factors. Almost all of those countries are also suffering from declining birth rates as secularism increases. Most have much lower birth rates than the US. You could also look at the minimal long term fertility effects of pro birth legislation [1]. The material factors don't seem to be driving birth rates as much as many people seem to think. 1. https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-uncle-sam-boost-american-fertility https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-uncle-sam-boost-american-fert...

spoonjim 5y ago

One of the most troubling things about the decline in population growth is that the most educated people, and in my experience the most "planning-oriented" people in that group, are the ones least likely to have kids. This means that the people most equipped to tackle long-term problems are supplying the fewest number of children with their genes and values into the population, which will cause our electoral politics to be increasingly dominated by the uneducated and the impulsive.

watwut 5y ago
Too much of "planning-orientation" clashes with kids anyway.
NavinF 5y ago
https://xkcd.com/603/ https://xkcd.com/603/
mtrovo 5y ago
Only if we had better methods of allowing social mobility and selecting the best among us that wouldnt involve which family you came from. /s On a more serious note I really believe that only the "poor hustlers" strata of society is not having kids, i.e couples that have good jobs but would be poor if any of them stopped working, so they have a dog for now and pretend they will have kids after they're 40. If you go up on the ladder you probably don't have the same growth problem, take N=1 Ellon Musk with 7 kids as example. Reminds me of how having real animals on Blade Runner was a privilege of the ultra rich :).
- TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
  There is a strong connection between genetics and IQ.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ur-whale 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA

yobbo 5y ago

> The economy of the developed world for the last two centuries now has been built on demographic expansion It would be extremely difficult to establish this causation to some level that can be trusted. The causation is likely; economic growth > jobs > families > births.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Or: https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-american-women-delaying-motherhood-because-1847112786 https://www.theonion.com/study-finds-american-women-delaying...
MrPatan 5y ago
Causation typically goes forward in time

thefz 5y ago

We cannot strive for a continuous growth of the population since the earth's resources are finite. Someday we will have to stop, or regress; it's just that every generation does not want to be the one with more retirements and pensions over the shoulders of the working class.

nights192 5y ago
Alternatively, we may become an interstellar species and circumvent these problems for an entirely different set. I find it unfortunate that our milieu's become so thoroughly pessimistic as to the continued, unbounded prosperity of our race--I feel as though it engenders a sort of defeatism.
- pizza234 5y ago
  Resources availability is only one factor in the bigger picture - sustainability. Without sustainable politics/culture, the population will need endlessly to new locations. Space colonization would just postpone the need.
- j-pb 5y ago
  Space has at most cubed resources relative to time (we can only explore a sphere assuming non arbitrary FTL travel). Population growth is exponential. Even with space as a resource the math doesn't work out. You'd just keep the pyramid scheme running for a few hundred years with the 1% elite inhabiting earth, and the current cheap workforce of the third world inhabiting the astroid belt.
- Comevius 5y ago
  It's important to be realistic. We are not an interstellar species, we build infrastructure for cars and we can't even afford the maintenance bill on it. Even in space we could not afford an exponential growth. You would want to pace yourself before you can afford to reach other stars, then other galaxies. Eventually there will be nowhere to run.
  - zpeti 5y ago

dragonwriter 5y ago

> The economy of the developed world for the last two centuries now has been built on demographic expansion No, demographic expansion has been a side effect of technological development, which has also been the basis of the economy. That's been true not only in the two centuries and change since the first industrial revolution, but its also been true for the hundred centuries or so since the first agricultural revolution. That's kind of been petering off recently, the most obvious conclusion being that it is because agricultural and industrial capacity is no longer the limit on population, so continued development isn't fueling further growth.

rich_sasha 5y ago
I think both are true. If no technological progress happens, but the productive workforce is 1% bigger each year, cet par you expect a 1% GDP growth - 1% more stuff being made etc. But sure, we can move on from that. At one point, the strength of a nation was counted in coal and sulphuric acid output, and investing in factories was all the rage.
zhdc1 5y ago
> demographic expansion has been a side effect of technological development There was also a cultural side to it. Instead of being a linear relationships, it's more that technological development removed a population bottleneck and antiquated old family planning practices. Population growth is iirc highest in agricultural areas that experience significant increases in health care access and overall life expectancy. Instead of having to have 6-8+ children to ensure that 1-2 male heirs live to adulthood, suddenly you're faced with the burden of having to care and feed for every single child until they become self sufficient. This eventually drives the birth rate down to an economically sustainable level.

jti107 5y ago

my brother just had twins and he told me it was gonna be $1000/month for daycare once they are 1-2 years old. and thats just for daycare...if you want to know why people aren't having kids, its because they are too expensive.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Market signals communicating that your job must compensate very well if you expect someone else to watch your kids while you work.

kypro 5y ago

I wish we stopped focusing so much on the overall economy growing every year and more on individuals having a "richer" quality of life. In the last few decades we've seen significant economic growth, yet people are living in smaller and smaller apartments, struggling with debt, living cities that are overpopulated and crowded, while economists try to assure us we're richer today, both from a GDP standpoint and a GDP per capita. It certainly doesn't feel like we're richer to me. A world that's less crowded and where you can afford a nice house with a garden on a single income would IMO be better than having a couple more zeros in my bank balance. We wonder why births are so low in the West, but when you're living in a 1 bed apartment and have $50,000 of debt you're not exactly going to be keen to introduce more financial problems into your life by having a kid. We see this play out in the UK with the working-class having significantly more kids because for them in many cases it actually benefits them financially to do so. Our priorities seem wrong as a society. We're looking at metrics to optimise business health instead of personal health. We're using immigration to prop on the population while not asking why people in the society feel they're unable to have children. I think when people criticise capitalism what they're really annoyed about is this. Why are our politicians so focused business health and not on ours? Why can't we afford to buy a nice home on a single income and have money left over to raise a family? I keep hearing how people want to live in apartments in the city, go into debt and uni and don't want kids, but what choice do we have? These days we literally need to go to uni and live in small apartments in a city where we have no friends or family just to get a good job. And if we're really lucky we might have enough money for a kid by the time we're 35.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.md/GsNcf https://archive.md/GsNcf

Ajay-p 5y ago

The article seems to posit that immigration is the only way for American population to continue to grow, but I am not convinced population growth is desirable. My family comes from a place where population growth has exceeded resources. Instead of encouraging population growth, might it be wiser to reinvest in population efficiency and productivity?

charwalker 5y ago
Planet Money (NPR) ran a segment in 2018 related to Trumps promise of growing GDP by 3-5%+. They theorized 3 ways to do so with one being "...double our immigrant population over the next decade". Import people, they take jobs and spend money to grow GDP. Another option was delay retirement by about 10 years or work to 73 to expand the labor force and continue keeping people employed past (or into more) peak earning years. More income = more spending = higher GDP. Or, force labor participation to pull those out of the workforce in. And the third option was to enable 2 side by side dot-com capital purchasing booms or develop a new technology (like desktop/personal computers) that enables spending capital and increasing worker productivity at 2x the rate during the dot-com boom. Between those 3 options, immigration is a clear winner. We have the space though we need to invest in infrastructure/schools to build it out. The jobs are mostly there esp. after the last 4 years drove immigration, legal or not, way down. We trashed the Irish, Italians, Polish, Chinese, even put Japanese into internment camps about 70 years back before normalizing most of those groups into American Culture (at least in decent parts of the country). A taco truck on every corner is just a new variation of the American Dream. Immigrant turned small business owner/employer making a buck off the entrenched population to buy (or build) a home with 2 car garage and a covered section for the truck itself, maybe an RV down the line. 100 year old research by Thomas on Polish immigrants shows it takes less than 3 generations for an immigrant family to follow local customs, language, and other norms. In 40-60 years we'll be a more robust, wealthier, stronger nation thanks to a taco truck on every corner. Thomas has an odd career (and love life) but did develop a few neat theorems including how immigrants become part of the local culture over just a few short generations. His Thomas Theorem, "if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.", is not only profound but evergreen. How one interprets the situation will alter ones reaction like an oncologist always seeing cancer or a network admin always faulting DNS (usually correctly so). We have a sect of the US population that considers election meddling/fraud and more as real although experts, leaders, and many more note how insane those conspiracy theories are. But they are real in their consequences with immense division on topics as straightforward as vaccinations or the existence of the pandemic. It's kid of silly how even as technology advances, people stay pretty much the same. In large groups we're still just monkeys with quality tools. Planet Money Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/531956234 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/531956234 Thomas and the Polish Peasant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polish_Peasant_in_Europe_and_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polish_Peasant_in_Europe_a...

lamontcg 5y ago

Tax billionaires out of existence, free college, free health care, limit investment in rental properties and do away with vast chunks of zoning laws. Stop forcing Americans to life all their life to pay off their debt and making children expensive luxuries that only the rich can afford. (And I can already feel the aneurysm I just gave half the people on this forum)

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Children are expensive luxuries. Why would you subsidize them when there are 7.4B people in the world, with population momentum on track to arrive at 10B near the end of the century? Subsidized higher education, universal healthcare, and higher taxes on the wealthiest are still all fine ideas, ideas I fully support. But the world needs less people regardless of those policies. We overshot global carrying capacity, and you can't socialized economic system your way out of that.
- OzyM 5y ago
  Generally speaking, the highest birth rates aren't in the types of counties overrepresented on HN. Our best shot for reducing the global birth rate is improving education in developing nations (particularly women's education[0]), improving access to contraception, and reducing child mortality. I agree socializing developed nations' economic systems isn't having a huge effect on the global population growth. Focusing on the real problem means investing in the health & development of those with the actual highest birthrates, not making U.S. colleges cheaper. [0] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-education-and-its-impact-on-fertility.pdf https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-educati...
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Birth rates are a component, but so is per capita environmental impact. Lower total fertility rates everywhere are welcome [1], but if one were to prioritize efforts, you'd focus on highest per capita environmental impact (whether that be CO2 emissions, consumption beyond replenishment rate of natural resources, etc). I'll go so far as to say that empowering women through education and family planning access alone in some countries isn't enough; you might have to provide direct cash payments to assist in developing agency through career development or entrepreneurial efforts. Otherwise, from my research [2] [3], they're beholden to their partner's family wishes (which may not align with their own, and they may not have the safety or security to assert their will). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/ https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/ [2] https://theconversation.com/family-size-why-some-nigerian-men-want-more-children-159692 https://theconversation.com/family-size-why-some-nigerian-me... ("Family size: why some Nigerian men want more children") [3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/africa-s-population-will-soar-dangerously-unless-women-are-more-empowered/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/africa-s-populati... ("Men also have to relinquish sole control over the decision to have children and refrain from abusing wives or partners who seek birth control.")

game_the0ry 5y ago

I knew that article would mention immigration. Here's the gist: * older people people favor policy that benefits themselves by sacrificing their kids * young people have been economically tapped out and have lost confidence in supporting a family, thus wont have children * population declines across the developed world [1] * "elites" see writing on the wall and rightly anticipate economic decline * elites and owners of assets (who are typically older) advocate for more favorable policies for themselves (lower wealth taxes, lower inheritance tax, NIMBY-isms) while also advocating for more immigration to keep labor costs down and population growth up * young people get squeezed (again) with the double whammy of stagnant wages and high housing costs And thus the US is set up for an ugly political war between: * young vs old * those who do not own assets vs asset owners * anti-establishment vs establishment * socialism vs capitalism * closed borders vs open borders * etc Which is playing out as we speak. [1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2019/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2019/

mikewarot 5y ago

Productivity per non-farm worker has gone up steadily in the United States. [1] As we keep becoming more productive, the economy will continue to grow, even without any change in overall population. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB