4 ms·

I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. The g

I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. The global economy runs on growth. If the population starts noticeably declining, it’ll take the economy down with it.

thrown_22 4y ago
A 60 year old woman can't give birth. It doesn't matter what incentives governments will give in 20 years: you can't beat biology. The women who can give birth in decades need to be born today. Yet birthrates are at their lowest levels ever. _Every_ developed country and most developing countries have committed suicide already, it's just that it will take 40 years for anyone to notice. The West is betting that immigrants will keep magically appearing whenever needed. The problem is that outside of a few countries torn apart by civil wars _nowhere_ are birth rates constant or let alone increasing. To put it in perspective: Bangladesh is below replacement fertility levels today. 40 years ago it had 8 children born per woman. Let me repeat that: Bangladesh today has fewer children born per woman than the US did in 2009.
- rcarr 4y ago
  Not sure this is true. Nigeria has population growth of 2.5% and fertility rate of 4.6. I think other African countries are similar. Africa will be the main spawn point for new humans this century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria
  - yreg 4y ago
    Ethiopia 2.6% Congo 3.2% Pakistan 2%
- dotancohen 4y ago
  How accurate is that reporting? Honestly, it sounds more like the ability of statisticians to access accurate data than such a drastic shift in culture.
- jjk166 4y ago
  The west doesn't need other nations to have high fertility rates, it just needs other nations to have people who want to immigrate to the west. Populations keep increasing for many years after the birthrate falls below replacement rate due to population momentum (people individually have fewer kids, but there are more people having kids than there used to be). And even after the population truly stops growing, people will still leave for wealthier areas in search of higher quality of life. If people keep emmigrating from a country with a sub replacement birth rate, eventually the population will get so low that there's no one left, but that would take many decades if not centuries. For example bangladesh has a net migration rate of -0.2%/yr and a birthrate 5% below replacement rate. Even if we ignore population momentum and assume bangladesh's population will immediately start falling, if they keep their current birth rate and migration rate it will take about 250 years for the population to halve, at which point it will still be about the same number of people that Germany has today.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
The era of growth through more people and more consumption is over. It is not sustainable. It will stop either because we have managed to come to our senses and stop it or because the instability caused by climate change will make it stop.
- mrleinad 4y ago
  I agree with your conclusion, but not for those reasons. It'll be over because the cheap resources that enabled that growth will not be there anymore (unless there's a major technological change like cold fusion or something like that).
  - yreg 4y ago
    A lot of the economic growth is happening without a need for cheap natural resources. Software services are a big one.
    - mrleinad 4y ago
      Software services are at the top of the pyramid. You need a lot of other things to be in the right place for software services to happen. You need to be able to have electricity, infrastructure, food, and an educated population. That's a tall order in many places, and it's going to be taller moving forward. And I'm not even mentioning computers. They're not going to get more affordable without China, but the opposite. Software development will adapt? Sure, things will move to the cloud as they've been moving for years already, but that puts a heavier load on having the right infrastructure for it.
dxuh 4y ago
Maybe not. The German population is aging rapidly, our retirement model (young people pay for old people) is unsustainable and obviously unfeasible by the time I get to retire (in about 35 years), because there are too few young people to pay for the many old people. Right now about 30% of the German population is over 60 years old. I do not have the impression that the government is doing anything to improve the birth rates. If anything it's getting harder for many people to have children. So far the only time a low birth rate is being brought up politically it's to justify immigration, which might be a temporary solution, but whether it's good or not or how it should be done is a different discussion.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  > by the time I get to retire (in about 35 years) Assuming they don't keep doing what they are doing and raise the retirement age. I doubt I'll live to whatever the retirement age is, by then.
- iso1631 4y ago
  > our retirement model (young people pay for old people) is unsustainable All retirement models are like that. Doesn't matter how many millions of dollars the old people have, if you are on an island with 10 workers and 50 old people, the old people are screwed.
Certhas 4y ago
Or, you know, we change our economic model. As far as I know incentives for more children have historically not been very successful. It seems that in a modern society human nature reliably settles on a birthrate below two per couple. e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-vs-human-development-index?time=1980..2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-vs-hum...
graphpapa 4y ago
This makes me realise the growth model is a sort of pyramid scheme.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  Pensions certainly are, public or private. Old people use to rely on their kids to provide them when they retire. Now the kids can't even make a living for themselves or buy a house, because the "market" needs to yield enough for pension funds, no matter how. This system will collapse, sooner or later.
piyush_soni 4y ago
I'd heard Japan already has a mild version of this.
throw_m239339 4y ago
> I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. With what money? Babies are seen as a liability more than a investment among young people. No amount of money the government can afford will change that. It's a consequence of ultra-individualism driven by mass market societies and the disintegration of the nuclear family in western societies. The other extreme is of course gender imbalance where females are deemed worthless, you can't fix that with money either.
_vbnz 4y ago
We have labour-saving technology though. Automation leads to higher productivity, so those fewer people can earn more and spend more. The economy will do just fine. I think it'll be a rocky time though, we're facing a new Industrial Revolution - where the existing capitalists would prefer to drive down wages and destroy trade unions via mass immigration, and ordinary workers want to reverse their worsening standard of living. Brexit was just the start of this, but I think we'll see more radical movements until this is resolved.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > We have labour-saving technology though. > Automation leads to higher productivity, so those fewer people can earn more and spend more. I can't believe people use that outdated 1900s era argument despite it being proved completely wrong time and time over. It was true at some point but has been wrong since sometime after ww2
lynx23 4y ago
Infinite growth is an obvious myth. The fans of "global economy" better find something to replace growth with, or they will be pretty disappointed in a few decades.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Capitalism requires infinite growth. It will collapse without
  - lynx23 4y ago
    Then it will collapse.
    - yreg 4y ago
      Why do you believe an infinite growth is impossible? It can run on merely increasing the net productivity. Which can be done up until a post-scarcity society at which point capitalism is obsolete anyway.
      - lynx23 4y ago
        Common sense tells me that infinite growth inside a finite system is wishful-thinking at least and more likely bullshit to distract from reality.
b112 4y ago
It was alreasy tried in Quebec, 20+ years ago, and failed. Massive tax rebates(not credits against tax owed, but rebates for each child). The true issue is, likely due to something environmental, humans are not driven to reproduce. You may say, "More people aee choosing not to...". Wrong. Reproduction is a greater drive than eating. It is more important than anything, biologically. And as an example, many cancer patients literally waste away. They know they should eat. They know that 1/2 their problem is lack of healthy food, it makes them weak, keeps them bedridden, but they cannot even force themselves to eat. Reproduction not sex, reproduction is a core, base drive beyond our control. And no, sex isn't reproduction. Biology is smarter than that. My point is, birthrates are not falling due to cost, or any other assumptions, because governments have tried to eliminate that, and it makes no difference. And it is not cultural, for whether Canada, the EU, Russia, or Japan, anywhere which adopts a modern lifestyle, birth rate plummet. Japan 20 years ago had a plummeting birthrate, yet their culture is quite different than the rest, and 20 years ago, a lot less forgiving to female rights. Whether climate, geography, war or peace, culture, language, religion, schooling, support by the state, cost of raising children, birth control or not, birth rates are plummeting world wide. And it is because something is blocking .. something, which causes reproductive drive. If you look at die offs of species on graphs, it typically slowly decreases, then takes a crazy plummet. If this is accurate for humans, by 2100 we will have 2b, by 2150 500M, by 2200 100M, and this presumes no massive war, plague, etc.
rapsey 4y ago
It would take some highly drastic changes to the entire social system to make a serious dent. Modern life is simply an anathema to having lots of children. The cost in time and money to the parents is too high.
chinathrow 4y ago
> The global economy runs on growth. Our collective failure summarized in one sentence.
coldtea 4y ago
>I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. After the lifestyle has changed, the economy has different impact, and its population is already older, it might not be recoverable anymore. There will be fewer people available in child-having age, despite the incentives, and those that are wont suddenly start having 3-4 children to compensate.
jjk166 4y ago
Far more likely they will just reform their immigration policies to make it easier for people to move into the country. Increasing birthrates has a long lead time, it takes at least a generation from when incentives begin to when you start seeing an increase in the number of economically active tax paying adults. And due to population momentum and cultural inertia, it is likely to take much longer than that still. Immigrants on the other hand can change the shape of a population pyramid on the timescale of a political administration and they start contributing to the economy immediately. Further immigrants tend to come from higher birthrate regions and will likely continue those practices for at least a generation after arrival, leading to long term improvements in population growth. Not every country is a desirable destination for immigrants, and some cultures have stronger barriers than others to assimilation of foreigners, but for many nations growth should easily be possible so long as there are people looking for a higher quality of life, which presumably will still be the case even decades after the world's population levels off.

thrown_22 4y ago

A 60 year old woman can't give birth. It doesn't matter what incentives governments will give in 20 years: you can't beat biology. The women who can give birth in decades need to be born today. Yet birthrates are at their lowest levels ever. _Every_ developed country and most developing countries have committed suicide already, it's just that it will take 40 years for anyone to notice. The West is betting that immigrants will keep magically appearing whenever needed. The problem is that outside of a few countries torn apart by civil wars _nowhere_ are birth rates constant or let alone increasing. To put it in perspective: Bangladesh is below replacement fertility levels today. 40 years ago it had 8 children born per woman. Let me repeat that: Bangladesh today has fewer children born per woman than the US did in 2009.

rcarr 4y ago
Not sure this is true. Nigeria has population growth of 2.5% and fertility rate of 4.6. I think other African countries are similar. Africa will be the main spawn point for new humans this century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria
- yreg 4y ago
  Ethiopia 2.6% Congo 3.2% Pakistan 2%
dotancohen 4y ago
How accurate is that reporting? Honestly, it sounds more like the ability of statisticians to access accurate data than such a drastic shift in culture.
jjk166 4y ago
The west doesn't need other nations to have high fertility rates, it just needs other nations to have people who want to immigrate to the west. Populations keep increasing for many years after the birthrate falls below replacement rate due to population momentum (people individually have fewer kids, but there are more people having kids than there used to be). And even after the population truly stops growing, people will still leave for wealthier areas in search of higher quality of life. If people keep emmigrating from a country with a sub replacement birth rate, eventually the population will get so low that there's no one left, but that would take many decades if not centuries. For example bangladesh has a net migration rate of -0.2%/yr and a birthrate 5% below replacement rate. Even if we ignore population momentum and assume bangladesh's population will immediately start falling, if they keep their current birth rate and migration rate it will take about 250 years for the population to halve, at which point it will still be about the same number of people that Germany has today.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

The era of growth through more people and more consumption is over. It is not sustainable. It will stop either because we have managed to come to our senses and stop it or because the instability caused by climate change will make it stop.

mrleinad 4y ago
I agree with your conclusion, but not for those reasons. It'll be over because the cheap resources that enabled that growth will not be there anymore (unless there's a major technological change like cold fusion or something like that).
- yreg 4y ago
  A lot of the economic growth is happening without a need for cheap natural resources. Software services are a big one.
  - mrleinad 4y ago
    Software services are at the top of the pyramid. You need a lot of other things to be in the right place for software services to happen. You need to be able to have electricity, infrastructure, food, and an educated population. That's a tall order in many places, and it's going to be taller moving forward. And I'm not even mentioning computers. They're not going to get more affordable without China, but the opposite. Software development will adapt? Sure, things will move to the cloud as they've been moving for years already, but that puts a heavier load on having the right infrastructure for it.

dxuh 4y ago

Maybe not. The German population is aging rapidly, our retirement model (young people pay for old people) is unsustainable and obviously unfeasible by the time I get to retire (in about 35 years), because there are too few young people to pay for the many old people. Right now about 30% of the German population is over 60 years old. I do not have the impression that the government is doing anything to improve the birth rates. If anything it's getting harder for many people to have children. So far the only time a low birth rate is being brought up politically it's to justify immigration, which might be a temporary solution, but whether it's good or not or how it should be done is a different discussion.

Akronymus 4y ago
> by the time I get to retire (in about 35 years) Assuming they don't keep doing what they are doing and raise the retirement age. I doubt I'll live to whatever the retirement age is, by then.
iso1631 4y ago
> our retirement model (young people pay for old people) is unsustainable All retirement models are like that. Doesn't matter how many millions of dollars the old people have, if you are on an island with 10 workers and 50 old people, the old people are screwed.

Certhas 4y ago

Or, you know, we change our economic model. As far as I know incentives for more children have historically not been very successful. It seems that in a modern society human nature reliably settles on a birthrate below two per couple. e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-vs-human-development-index?time=1980..2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-vs-hum...

graphpapa 4y ago

This makes me realise the growth model is a sort of pyramid scheme.

throw_m239339 4y ago
Pensions certainly are, public or private. Old people use to rely on their kids to provide them when they retire. Now the kids can't even make a living for themselves or buy a house, because the "market" needs to yield enough for pension funds, no matter how. This system will collapse, sooner or later.

piyush_soni 4y ago

I'd heard Japan already has a mild version of this.

throw_m239339 4y ago

> I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. With what money? Babies are seen as a liability more than a investment among young people. No amount of money the government can afford will change that. It's a consequence of ultra-individualism driven by mass market societies and the disintegration of the nuclear family in western societies. The other extreme is of course gender imbalance where females are deemed worthless, you can't fix that with money either.

_vbnz 4y ago

We have labour-saving technology though. Automation leads to higher productivity, so those fewer people can earn more and spend more. The economy will do just fine. I think it'll be a rocky time though, we're facing a new Industrial Revolution - where the existing capitalists would prefer to drive down wages and destroy trade unions via mass immigration, and ordinary workers want to reverse their worsening standard of living. Brexit was just the start of this, but I think we'll see more radical movements until this is resolved.

lm28469 4y ago
> We have labour-saving technology though. > Automation leads to higher productivity, so those fewer people can earn more and spend more. I can't believe people use that outdated 1900s era argument despite it being proved completely wrong time and time over. It was true at some point but has been wrong since sometime after ww2

lynx23 4y ago

Infinite growth is an obvious myth. The fans of "global economy" better find something to replace growth with, or they will be pretty disappointed in a few decades.

bowsamic 4y ago
Capitalism requires infinite growth. It will collapse without
- lynx23 4y ago
  Then it will collapse.
  - yreg 4y ago
    Why do you believe an infinite growth is impossible? It can run on merely increasing the net productivity. Which can be done up until a post-scarcity society at which point capitalism is obsolete anyway.
    - lynx23 4y ago
      Common sense tells me that infinite growth inside a finite system is wishful-thinking at least and more likely bullshit to distract from reality.

b112 4y ago

It was alreasy tried in Quebec, 20+ years ago, and failed. Massive tax rebates(not credits against tax owed, but rebates for each child). The true issue is, likely due to something environmental, humans are not driven to reproduce. You may say, "More people aee choosing not to...". Wrong. Reproduction is a greater drive than eating. It is more important than anything, biologically. And as an example, many cancer patients literally waste away. They know they should eat. They know that 1/2 their problem is lack of healthy food, it makes them weak, keeps them bedridden, but they cannot even force themselves to eat. Reproduction not sex, reproduction is a core, base drive beyond our control. And no, sex isn't reproduction. Biology is smarter than that. My point is, birthrates are not falling due to cost, or any other assumptions, because governments have tried to eliminate that, and it makes no difference. And it is not cultural, for whether Canada, the EU, Russia, or Japan, anywhere which adopts a modern lifestyle, birth rate plummet. Japan 20 years ago had a plummeting birthrate, yet their culture is quite different than the rest, and 20 years ago, a lot less forgiving to female rights. Whether climate, geography, war or peace, culture, language, religion, schooling, support by the state, cost of raising children, birth control or not, birth rates are plummeting world wide. And it is because something is blocking .. something, which causes reproductive drive. If you look at die offs of species on graphs, it typically slowly decreases, then takes a crazy plummet. If this is accurate for humans, by 2100 we will have 2b, by 2150 500M, by 2200 100M, and this presumes no massive war, plague, etc.

rapsey 4y ago

It would take some highly drastic changes to the entire social system to make a serious dent. Modern life is simply an anathema to having lots of children. The cost in time and money to the parents is too high.

chinathrow 4y ago

> The global economy runs on growth. Our collective failure summarized in one sentence.

coldtea 4y ago

>I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. After the lifestyle has changed, the economy has different impact, and its population is already older, it might not be recoverable anymore. There will be fewer people available in child-having age, despite the incentives, and those that are wont suddenly start having 3-4 children to compensate.

jjk166 4y ago

Far more likely they will just reform their immigration policies to make it easier for people to move into the country. Increasing birthrates has a long lead time, it takes at least a generation from when incentives begin to when you start seeing an increase in the number of economically active tax paying adults. And due to population momentum and cultural inertia, it is likely to take much longer than that still. Immigrants on the other hand can change the shape of a population pyramid on the timescale of a political administration and they start contributing to the economy immediately. Further immigrants tend to come from higher birthrate regions and will likely continue those practices for at least a generation after arrival, leading to long term improvements in population growth. Not every country is a desirable destination for immigrants, and some cultures have stronger barriers than others to assimilation of foreigners, but for many nations growth should easily be possible so long as there are people looking for a higher quality of life, which presumably will still be the case even decades after the world's population levels off.