5 ms·

the US should place a value of $1.17M per additional birth

22 points by delichon 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
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roenxi 2y ago
This is well meaning but ridiculous. The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. More births are decidedly unhelpful. This weird effect where wealth reduces birth rate is a fantastic and unexpected reprieve that is probably not going to be permanent but there is no call to try and engineer its reversal. Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration. Let the planet drop down to 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty. As far as I can see there isn't enough for everyone to do now anyway, even before AI really comes into its own.
- deleted 2y ago
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- lm28469 2y ago
  > Let the planet drop down to 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty. ? The industrial revolution increased productivity x100 and poverty still exists. We could materially solve it right now, easily. It's designed to be like that
  - badpun 2y ago
    Depends on definiton of poverty. In many places, it has moved from living in objectively deprived conditions, to just being in the bottom centiles of population.
    - lm28469 2y ago
      > Depends on definiton of poverty. People dying of hunger, people not having clean water, people dying because the $5 antibiotic shot isn't available in their country, &c. I don't care about relative poverty here, aka poverty threshold, which is by definition a moving threshold. For exemple in France the poverty threshold is defined as 60% of the median income, it doesn't tell you much about the "real" poverty
  - xaellison 2y ago
    [dead]
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    It's not designed like that. If there were no poverty in the world, GDP would be much higher and opportunities for trade much bigger - but how to get there is anyone's guess.
    - lm28469 2y ago
      > If there were no poverty in the world, GDP would be much higher and opportunities for trade much bigger It's almost as if GDP doesn't mean jack shit since it's been completely misused from its intended purpose
      - RandomLensman 2y ago
        Not sure I understand your point in relation to mine. Generally, GDP means a lot in relation to other indicators (including those for well-being).
        lm28469 2y ago
        Nope, GDP is a completely outdated and next to useless metric, as any metric is when it becomes a target instead of a measurement. Some countries include illegal prostitution and illegal drug traffic in their GDP for exemple. GDP was an OK metric in a post war industrial world, not in whatever we could call what we're dealing with since the 90s, and even more since most of our "production" are services, GDP was just not meant to deal with that, not in any way that is meaningful to us in this discussion (and on top of that it is much better at measuring quantities than qualities) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gdp-is-the-wrong-tool-for-measuring-what-matters/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gdp-is-the-wrong-... https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-key-to-national-progress-is-no-longer-just-gdp-growth-its-prosperity/#:~:text=Since%20the%20end%20of%20World,country's%20wellbeing%20or%20social%20progress https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-ke....
        RandomLensman 2y ago
        Criticism of GDP is old and, yet, it endures and correlates well with a lot relevant things. So, I'd not ignore or discard it.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Well no, no we can't. That has been one of the issues that comes up every time someone does a quick check of what it would take for everyone to live even an average North American lifestyle, let alone something considered very comfortable by a US standard. We don't have the coal, we don't have the oil, we don't have the copper, the steel, the yadda yadda. Earth overshoot day was apparently last month. Less births is almost literally the only humane way I can think of to improve on that situation. That or cheap energy; the situation is hopeful on that front but we don't need to purposefully goose the birth rate since maybe something will go wrong with plan A.
    - lm28469 2y ago
      > an average North American lifestyle That's very very very far from poverty... What about everyone living like the average eastern european ? That's already a 2-10x drop of wealth, still far from poverty
    - analognoise 2y ago
      There’s an inhuman way as well: the US, faced with declining standard of living, decides to use the fact that it has 12 super aircraft carriers and the 1, 2, 4, and 6th largest air forces - to ensure that standard of living stays where it is. Who said we’d choose the humane option?
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > we don't have the steel We have the steel, there is no way we run out of it, we could wrap the entire earth in steel coating and still not run out, and that is just what we have easily available.
  - b3lvedere 2y ago
    By definition there will be no poverty when all resources are distributed equally, which will never happen.
    - lm28469 2y ago
      That's "poverty" as in "poverty threshold", that's not the only definition of the word. You're talking about "I can't buy the brand new iphone max pro" poverty while we have the "I will lose my hands to leprosy because the 10$ antibiotics were too expensive" poverty
      - b3lvedere 2y ago
        My apologies. I stand corrected.
  - aperson_hello 2y ago
    The share of the world population in extreme poverty has gone down by about 80% since 1960. And the number of people in extreme poverty has gone down by about 2/3 since 1970. It's getting better. Not as fast as it could or should, but it's getting better!!
    - marssaxman 2y ago
      Is it truly getting better, though, when the engine of improvement depends on ecological overshoot? We cannot sustain this; we're not even trying. A gambler living the high life in Vegas, all paid for by opening one new credit card after another, would undoubtedly tell you that his life is getting better, too.
  - Lammy 2y ago
    “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”
- pfdietz 2y ago
  > The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. Aside from fossil fuels, no, this is not the biggest problem. And for fossil fuels it's more a problem of lack of disposal resource for the CO2, not the fossil fuels themselves.
- dev1n 2y ago
  Malthusian takes like this are incorrect. I'd like to see where you were informed how "more births are decidedly unhelpful."
- rayiner 2y ago
  > The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. People keep saying this, but it’s been proven wrong over and over again since the 19th century. Malthus was wrong. > This weird effect where wealth reduces birth rate is a fantastic and unexpected reprieve that is probably not going to be permanent but there is no call to try and engineer its reversal. It’s not “nature.” It’s the result of anti-natalist eugenics ideology created by mainline Protestants in the 20th century in response to a moral panic about rising Catholic and black populations. They exported that ideology around the world through NGOs in the form of population control ideology. (My dad started his career at a Planned Parenthood affiliate in Bangladesh figuring out how to have less Bangladeshis. Planned Parenthood, of course, was started by Margaret Sanger, an Episcopalian and eugenicist.) East Asian countries that bought that ideology are now desperately trying to reverse the effects. > Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration. You can’t maintain a developed society with mass immigration. Sweden and Denmark have already reverse course on immigration and I expect the rest of Western Europe will follow.
  - nkurz 2y ago
    1) I instinctively agree with 'roenxi', but I'd also agree that I don't have a solid basis for this belief. Could you expand on your claim that Malthus was wrong, as opposed to just too early in his prediction? 2) Have even lawyers like you dropped the 'fewer' vs 'less' distinction? I would have thought that you were old and conservative enough that 'less Bangladeshis' would be to grating to write. :)
    - rayiner 2y ago
      Malthusians repeatedly fail to account for technological advancement. There's numerous studies estimating the carrying capacity of earth at above 10-20 billion (figures we likely will never reach): https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_Capacity.pdf https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_C... (see p. 3). When my dad was born in 1951, Bangladesh had a population of 38 million. People already thought it was full. Now, it has a population of 171 million. At the same time, infant mortality decreased by 7/8ths, so it is now lower in Bangladesh than it was in the U.S. in the 1960s. The country is now self-sufficient in the production of rice, fish, and vegetables. And Bangladesh hasn't even begun to maximize technology. The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, despite being 1/3 the size of Bangladesh (which itself is only a bit bigger than Virginia): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/net.... Regarding "fewer" versus "lesser": I'm usually pretty pedantic about that, but I think my brain fed me "lesser" to convey, in the context of that sentence, how population control advocates tend to view Asians as an undifferentiated mass.
- glimshe 2y ago
  Scarcity arguments have always been the domain of fear mongers. A much more concrete problem is the environmental impact of resource availability, the opposite of what you are saying. As the world gets richer, we will succeed at providing material wealth to the growing population... But at what cost? It is desirable to limit population growth nonetheless, and I think this will happen naturally, although possibly not soon enough. I don't have any magic bullet for reducing population growth; helping the poor get wealthier and more educated faster should help bring birth rates to just below the 2.1 children per couple (replacement rate) and get us to a soft landing.
- analognoise 2y ago
  > Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration This directly leads to political instability and lowered wages for the local population, and is decidedly not helpful. Why in the world should we engineer a society that is not self replicating, and burden our children with lower wages, just to save big businesses (who are the only people who thrive when importing labor).
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  > 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty. 1-2 billion people living a jet-set lifestyle would be far harder on our planet than 10 billion not.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  > The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. Just incredibly wrong about this
deleted 2y ago
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knodi123 2y ago
It's hard not to read this: > Birth rates are near or below replacement in all but the world’s poorest countries As "Too many of the wrong kind of people are being born. How can we get more of the right kind?" The entire underlying premise of the article is that the population should continue to grow forever or human progress is doomed. But that's not proven. And even if it were, I don't like "eugenics, but for nationalities instead of genetics" as the answer.
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  It is hard not to consider that possibility. But it should be easy not to read it that way - i.e. to give the benefit of the doubt that people can consider this a problem without being evil.
  - knodi123 2y ago
    I don't consider their fundamental premise sound, that if the poor countries are fecund and the rich countries are not, that it will automatically lead to the end of worldwide technological innovation. As I see things, it's a fact that, 1.) Immigration exists and is good, and 2.) it doesn't take very many years of education to turn someone from a disadvantaged background into a scientifically savvy modern person. If the author of this article merely forgot that, then that's quite an oversight. But you're right, it was uncharitable of me to assume he didn't forget, and actually thinks that either 1) or 2) are false. So I retract my cynicism and replace it with constructive criticism.
- lm28469 2y ago
  It's not about "kind" it's about wealth. Migrants coming to the west have vastly inferior fertility as their peers who stayed in their home country I see how your take fits in the current "polarise everything" craze but the bigger issue imho is that our modern way of life is actively destroying itself, consumerism is toxic to itself
  - knodi123 2y ago
    > the current "polarise everything" craze Don't think of it as a craze. Think of it more like, America just had a president that referred to many poor countries as "shitholes" and tried to block immigration from them. And as someone who has people they care deeply about who are immigrants from those countries, I have an increased sensitivity to certain dogwhistles which *absolutely* are being blown by some people. If I accidentally hear that dog whistle where the person only meant to discuss wealth, I hope you can understand why.
aurareturn 2y ago
>We conclude that the US government should be willing to pay up to $290,000, overall, to each parent who gives birth. This is a result of our model that shows that any new child born, that wouldn’t otherwise have been born without the subsidy, has a $1.03mn value to the US. In practice, suggestions for additional child tax credits from across the aisle should be implemented, and perhaps even greatly increased. I can totally see this getting exploited. Yes, you'll get some more well educated, mentally sane people to have more kids. For sure. But I think you'll get a ton more kids from people who are at the bottom of society such as criminals. If the kids born aren't raised well, they could be a net negative to society rather than a net $1.03m to the economy.
- carlmr 2y ago
  I see it the same way, you could maybe make the argument to give money depending on reaching certain educational milestones. But just handing over money is really prone to abuse by anyone that doesn't have a conscience.
michaelt 2y ago
> the US should place a value of 14.28x GDP per additional birth [...] the US should be willing to spend the equivalent of 3.8% of its GDP per birth. So... I assume there's a bunch of "per capitas" missing from this? Or are they trying to persuade us that an additional birth is worth 14.28*$25.44 trillion = $363 trillion ? I could be persuaded to supply one additional birth for just $1 trillion, if anyone is buying at that price.
paxys 2y ago
Making babies is easy, raising them into productive members of society is hard. Unless the government can ensure the latter, incentivizing the former is only going to lead to disaster.
- willcipriano 2y ago
  This is why the "We will bring in a billion immigrants" strategy is going to fail. You don't need a billion unskilled laborers, you need a hundred million people who can take part in an advanced economy.
  - paxys 2y ago
    > You don't need a billion unskilled laborers, you need a hundred million people who can take part in an advanced economy You need both
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Correct. What makes western societies work is the way children are socialized. You can’t outsource the socialization process to developing countries and import the adults. Most of my adult family members immigrated to the U.S./Canada/Australia as adults. They are still Bangladeshis. If you imported 50 million of them, and allowed them to vote and participate in civic institutions, you would turn Canada or Australia into Bangladesh.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > This is why the "We will bring in a billion immigrants" strategy is going to fail. That strategy is going to fail from simple math. Birthrates are dropping everywhere, and IIRC world fertility is at replacement or maybe even a little bit below it today. Immigrants have be born somewhere, and if that policy works at all, it will only amount to exporting the problem to places even less equipped to deal with it. Do liberals really want to do what it takes to implement the immigration strategy (e.g. hold down Africa and keep it really poor, so its birthrates remain high and Western countries [and China, and India!] can raid it for population forever)?
- rayiner 2y ago
jcfrei 2y ago
I have a different, albeit probably more cynical take on birth rates. As soon as machines reach feature parity with humans population size will turn into a liability and stop being an asset. And once again the west is ahead of the curve, with low population size and birth rates below 2.1. Once all physical labor is done by machines comparative advantages that have allowed developing countries to catch up will stop working. Instead comparative advantages will shift to countries with cheap resources and most importantly lots of robots and highly integrated industries. Like most technological developments they will ultimately benefit everyone in absolute terms - but will relatively speaking make disparities worse: Ie. the low population, high resources countries (ie. the North) will get even richer, the population rich south will stay poor in comparison.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >Once all physical labor is done by machines Are you sure about the physical labor part? Because I'm yet to see a machine make fruit pickers, plumbers, construction workers, oil & gas workers, landscapers, or caregivers even remotely not viable anymore in the workplace. Meanwhile I'm seeing machines put various graphic designers out of jobs right now. Who's jobs do you think the companies will go after first in the race to replace expensive labor with cheaper automation? The minimum wage burger flippers or migrant fruit pickers barely paid 10$/hour who gets no vacation and sick leave, or, the web developer/graphic designers paid $60+/hour who gets healthcare, paid time off, free meals and massages at work?
  - jcfrei 2y ago
    Work that can be done in front of a computer screen will obviously be replaced first, your examples are the jobs that I consider the last ones to be taken over by machines. And that's when my described scenario would take place - not before.
  - defrost 2y ago
    All physical labour being done by machine is a bit of a pipe dream for now. What is an actual reality is that more and more physical work is actually being completed by fewer and fewer people. In my lifetime I've seen first hand, since the 1970s, mining and agriculture expand production dramatically with smaller work forces being required through the multiplying magic of SBFM (Seriously Big Flippin' Machines) - Haulpacks, Tractors, Ships, Trucking, Trains, have grown is size; blast patterns for fracturing rock have increased their field sizes, continuous conveyors moving 100s of tonnes per hour have multiplied in parallel. As for fruit picking, maybe look at orchard automation - there are many examples of tight geometric spacings for trees that are robo-mowed to supress weeds and harvested by laying down ground sheets and using hydralic tree shakers to bring down and gather up fruit, etc. Maybe watch more Landline - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline_(TV_series)
jacknews 2y ago
"humanity could have less than a century of current-level innovation left, forever." Why? Instead of maintaining our current massive population, we should seek to improve efficiency. Ensure every child receives a comprehensive education. Ensure every human has time and energy for creative endeavors, rather than just paying the rent. And so on. Population isn't the problem, how we structure society is.
- b3lvedere 2y ago
  Perhaps it's even more basic nature. Everything alive tries to stay alive and get better, at the expense of anything else, including other living creatures.
- rayiner 2y ago
  Education doesn’t make people smarter.
  - jacknews 2y ago
    Your statement seems to me to assume that our current society discovers the geniuses and transports them magically to caltech, princeton or wherever. I would guess that many are actually making a living fixing tv's in a nairobi slum, or conjuring their own pantheon in a south american jungle, etc, etc.
    - deleted 2y ago
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FlyingAvatar 2y ago
I would argue the parenting is of much greater value than the birth itself. In general, the better the parenting, the greater the net value of the child to society. > We conclude that the US government should be willing to pay up to $290,000, overall, to each parent who gives birth. This is a weirdly short-sighted suggestion after all that analysis. Getting paid to have children can easily cause the value metric per child to plummet; not to mention the probable suffering caused to the children whose parents might try to abuse it. If you want to increase births, things like subsidizing daycare and after-care and taking steps to ensure the quality of care are helpful. Making the cost of having children lower indirectly is much less likely to be abused. Additionally, if you want to increase the value of children to society, making teaching a more appealing profession (i.e. paying more) and taking steps to ensure the quality of teachers are helpful.
- tootie 2y ago
  It's really not parenting. A child's future potential is predominantly determined by genetics and environment. Parenting is third place. This is actually backed up by research.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Exactly. If the US is going to pay to incentivize something, let's not incentivize merely "pumping out kids." Hold the payment until the kid is 21, and only pay the parent(s) if he or she turns out to be an employed non-imprisoned, productive member of society.
cyrnel 2y ago
There are countless (sane) ways for governments to spend $290k to earn $1M back, like funding some promising research, job training programs, building infrastructure, etc.
josefritzishere 2y ago
We should follow Japans lead and liberalise immigration laws. It makes the entire problem moot.
nojvek 2y ago
We are going to be fine. We exploded 10X in a century. A bit of population correction is going to be a bit rough but fine in long term. Fewer healthier wealthier people living sustainably with the planet harnessing vast amounts of energy and automation. That’s a wonderful future to look forward to. Declining birth rates and increasing health spans are humans adjusting to resource constraints.

22 points by delichon 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

This is well meaning but ridiculous. The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. More births are decidedly unhelpful. This weird effect where wealth reduces birth rate is a fantastic and unexpected reprieve that is probably not going to be permanent but there is no call to try and engineer its reversal. Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration. Let the planet drop down to 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty. As far as I can see there isn't enough for everyone to do now anyway, even before AI really comes into its own.

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lm28469 2y ago
> Let the planet drop down to 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty. ? The industrial revolution increased productivity x100 and poverty still exists. We could materially solve it right now, easily. It's designed to be like that
- badpun 2y ago
  Depends on definiton of poverty. In many places, it has moved from living in objectively deprived conditions, to just being in the bottom centiles of population.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    > Depends on definiton of poverty. People dying of hunger, people not having clean water, people dying because the $5 antibiotic shot isn't available in their country, &c. I don't care about relative poverty here, aka poverty threshold, which is by definition a moving threshold. For exemple in France the poverty threshold is defined as 60% of the median income, it doesn't tell you much about the "real" poverty
- xaellison 2y ago
  [dead]
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  It's not designed like that. If there were no poverty in the world, GDP would be much higher and opportunities for trade much bigger - but how to get there is anyone's guess.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    > If there were no poverty in the world, GDP would be much higher and opportunities for trade much bigger It's almost as if GDP doesn't mean jack shit since it's been completely misused from its intended purpose
    - RandomLensman 2y ago
      Not sure I understand your point in relation to mine. Generally, GDP means a lot in relation to other indicators (including those for well-being).
      - lm28469 2y ago
        Nope, GDP is a completely outdated and next to useless metric, as any metric is when it becomes a target instead of a measurement. Some countries include illegal prostitution and illegal drug traffic in their GDP for exemple. GDP was an OK metric in a post war industrial world, not in whatever we could call what we're dealing with since the 90s, and even more since most of our "production" are services, GDP was just not meant to deal with that, not in any way that is meaningful to us in this discussion (and on top of that it is much better at measuring quantities than qualities) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gdp-is-the-wrong-tool-for-measuring-what-matters/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gdp-is-the-wrong-... https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-key-to-national-progress-is-no-longer-just-gdp-growth-its-prosperity/#:~:text=Since%20the%20end%20of%20World,country's%20wellbeing%20or%20social%20progress https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-ke....
        RandomLensman 2y ago
        Criticism of GDP is old and, yet, it endures and correlates well with a lot relevant things. So, I'd not ignore or discard it.
- roenxi 2y ago
  Well no, no we can't. That has been one of the issues that comes up every time someone does a quick check of what it would take for everyone to live even an average North American lifestyle, let alone something considered very comfortable by a US standard. We don't have the coal, we don't have the oil, we don't have the copper, the steel, the yadda yadda. Earth overshoot day was apparently last month. Less births is almost literally the only humane way I can think of to improve on that situation. That or cheap energy; the situation is hopeful on that front but we don't need to purposefully goose the birth rate since maybe something will go wrong with plan A.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    > an average North American lifestyle That's very very very far from poverty... What about everyone living like the average eastern european ? That's already a 2-10x drop of wealth, still far from poverty
  - analognoise 2y ago
    There’s an inhuman way as well: the US, faced with declining standard of living, decides to use the fact that it has 12 super aircraft carriers and the 1, 2, 4, and 6th largest air forces - to ensure that standard of living stays where it is. Who said we’d choose the humane option?
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > we don't have the steel We have the steel, there is no way we run out of it, we could wrap the entire earth in steel coating and still not run out, and that is just what we have easily available.
- b3lvedere 2y ago
  By definition there will be no poverty when all resources are distributed equally, which will never happen.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    That's "poverty" as in "poverty threshold", that's not the only definition of the word. You're talking about "I can't buy the brand new iphone max pro" poverty while we have the "I will lose my hands to leprosy because the 10$ antibiotics were too expensive" poverty
    - b3lvedere 2y ago
      My apologies. I stand corrected.
- aperson_hello 2y ago
  The share of the world population in extreme poverty has gone down by about 80% since 1960. And the number of people in extreme poverty has gone down by about 2/3 since 1970. It's getting better. Not as fast as it could or should, but it's getting better!!
  - marssaxman 2y ago
    Is it truly getting better, though, when the engine of improvement depends on ecological overshoot? We cannot sustain this; we're not even trying. A gambler living the high life in Vegas, all paid for by opening one new credit card after another, would undoubtedly tell you that his life is getting better, too.
- Lammy 2y ago
  “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”
pfdietz 2y ago
> The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. Aside from fossil fuels, no, this is not the biggest problem. And for fossil fuels it's more a problem of lack of disposal resource for the CO2, not the fossil fuels themselves.
dev1n 2y ago
Malthusian takes like this are incorrect. I'd like to see where you were informed how "more births are decidedly unhelpful."
rayiner 2y ago
> The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. People keep saying this, but it’s been proven wrong over and over again since the 19th century. Malthus was wrong. > This weird effect where wealth reduces birth rate is a fantastic and unexpected reprieve that is probably not going to be permanent but there is no call to try and engineer its reversal. It’s not “nature.” It’s the result of anti-natalist eugenics ideology created by mainline Protestants in the 20th century in response to a moral panic about rising Catholic and black populations. They exported that ideology around the world through NGOs in the form of population control ideology. (My dad started his career at a Planned Parenthood affiliate in Bangladesh figuring out how to have less Bangladeshis. Planned Parenthood, of course, was started by Margaret Sanger, an Episcopalian and eugenicist.) East Asian countries that bought that ideology are now desperately trying to reverse the effects. > Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration. You can’t maintain a developed society with mass immigration. Sweden and Denmark have already reverse course on immigration and I expect the rest of Western Europe will follow.
- nkurz 2y ago
  1) I instinctively agree with 'roenxi', but I'd also agree that I don't have a solid basis for this belief. Could you expand on your claim that Malthus was wrong, as opposed to just too early in his prediction? 2) Have even lawyers like you dropped the 'fewer' vs 'less' distinction? I would have thought that you were old and conservative enough that 'less Bangladeshis' would be to grating to write. :)
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Malthusians repeatedly fail to account for technological advancement. There's numerous studies estimating the carrying capacity of earth at above 10-20 billion (figures we likely will never reach): https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_Capacity.pdf https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_C... (see p. 3). When my dad was born in 1951, Bangladesh had a population of 38 million. People already thought it was full. Now, it has a population of 171 million. At the same time, infant mortality decreased by 7/8ths, so it is now lower in Bangladesh than it was in the U.S. in the 1960s. The country is now self-sufficient in the production of rice, fish, and vegetables. And Bangladesh hasn't even begun to maximize technology. The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, despite being 1/3 the size of Bangladesh (which itself is only a bit bigger than Virginia): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/net.... Regarding "fewer" versus "lesser": I'm usually pretty pedantic about that, but I think my brain fed me "lesser" to convey, in the context of that sentence, how population control advocates tend to view Asians as an undifferentiated mass.
glimshe 2y ago
Scarcity arguments have always been the domain of fear mongers. A much more concrete problem is the environmental impact of resource availability, the opposite of what you are saying. As the world gets richer, we will succeed at providing material wealth to the growing population... But at what cost? It is desirable to limit population growth nonetheless, and I think this will happen naturally, although possibly not soon enough. I don't have any magic bullet for reducing population growth; helping the poor get wealthier and more educated faster should help bring birth rates to just below the 2.1 children per couple (replacement rate) and get us to a soft landing.
analognoise 2y ago
> Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration This directly leads to political instability and lowered wages for the local population, and is decidedly not helpful. Why in the world should we engineer a society that is not self replicating, and burden our children with lower wages, just to save big businesses (who are the only people who thrive when importing labor).
bryanlarsen 2y ago
> 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty. 1-2 billion people living a jet-set lifestyle would be far harder on our planet than 10 billion not.
HDThoreaun 2y ago
> The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. Just incredibly wrong about this

deleted 2y ago

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knodi123 2y ago

It's hard not to read this: > Birth rates are near or below replacement in all but the world’s poorest countries As "Too many of the wrong kind of people are being born. How can we get more of the right kind?" The entire underlying premise of the article is that the population should continue to grow forever or human progress is doomed. But that's not proven. And even if it were, I don't like "eugenics, but for nationalities instead of genetics" as the answer.

happytoexplain 2y ago
It is hard not to consider that possibility. But it should be easy not to read it that way - i.e. to give the benefit of the doubt that people can consider this a problem without being evil.
- knodi123 2y ago
  I don't consider their fundamental premise sound, that if the poor countries are fecund and the rich countries are not, that it will automatically lead to the end of worldwide technological innovation. As I see things, it's a fact that, 1.) Immigration exists and is good, and 2.) it doesn't take very many years of education to turn someone from a disadvantaged background into a scientifically savvy modern person. If the author of this article merely forgot that, then that's quite an oversight. But you're right, it was uncharitable of me to assume he didn't forget, and actually thinks that either 1) or 2) are false. So I retract my cynicism and replace it with constructive criticism.
lm28469 2y ago
It's not about "kind" it's about wealth. Migrants coming to the west have vastly inferior fertility as their peers who stayed in their home country I see how your take fits in the current "polarise everything" craze but the bigger issue imho is that our modern way of life is actively destroying itself, consumerism is toxic to itself
- knodi123 2y ago
  > the current "polarise everything" craze Don't think of it as a craze. Think of it more like, America just had a president that referred to many poor countries as "shitholes" and tried to block immigration from them. And as someone who has people they care deeply about who are immigrants from those countries, I have an increased sensitivity to certain dogwhistles which *absolutely* are being blown by some people. If I accidentally hear that dog whistle where the person only meant to discuss wealth, I hope you can understand why.

aurareturn 2y ago

>We conclude that the US government should be willing to pay up to $290,000, overall, to each parent who gives birth. This is a result of our model that shows that any new child born, that wouldn’t otherwise have been born without the subsidy, has a $1.03mn value to the US. In practice, suggestions for additional child tax credits from across the aisle should be implemented, and perhaps even greatly increased. I can totally see this getting exploited. Yes, you'll get some more well educated, mentally sane people to have more kids. For sure. But I think you'll get a ton more kids from people who are at the bottom of society such as criminals. If the kids born aren't raised well, they could be a net negative to society rather than a net $1.03m to the economy.

carlmr 2y ago
I see it the same way, you could maybe make the argument to give money depending on reaching certain educational milestones. But just handing over money is really prone to abuse by anyone that doesn't have a conscience.

michaelt 2y ago

> the US should place a value of 14.28x GDP per additional birth [...] the US should be willing to spend the equivalent of 3.8% of its GDP per birth. So... I assume there's a bunch of "per capitas" missing from this? Or are they trying to persuade us that an additional birth is worth 14.28*$25.44 trillion = $363 trillion ? I could be persuaded to supply one additional birth for just $1 trillion, if anyone is buying at that price.

paxys 2y ago

Making babies is easy, raising them into productive members of society is hard. Unless the government can ensure the latter, incentivizing the former is only going to lead to disaster.

willcipriano 2y ago
This is why the "We will bring in a billion immigrants" strategy is going to fail. You don't need a billion unskilled laborers, you need a hundred million people who can take part in an advanced economy.
- paxys 2y ago
  > You don't need a billion unskilled laborers, you need a hundred million people who can take part in an advanced economy You need both
- rayiner 2y ago
  Correct. What makes western societies work is the way children are socialized. You can’t outsource the socialization process to developing countries and import the adults. Most of my adult family members immigrated to the U.S./Canada/Australia as adults. They are still Bangladeshis. If you imported 50 million of them, and allowed them to vote and participate in civic institutions, you would turn Canada or Australia into Bangladesh.
- tivert 2y ago
  > This is why the "We will bring in a billion immigrants" strategy is going to fail. That strategy is going to fail from simple math. Birthrates are dropping everywhere, and IIRC world fertility is at replacement or maybe even a little bit below it today. Immigrants have be born somewhere, and if that policy works at all, it will only amount to exporting the problem to places even less equipped to deal with it. Do liberals really want to do what it takes to implement the immigration strategy (e.g. hold down Africa and keep it really poor, so its birthrates remain high and Western countries [and China, and India!] can raid it for population forever)?
rayiner 2y ago

jcfrei 2y ago

I have a different, albeit probably more cynical take on birth rates. As soon as machines reach feature parity with humans population size will turn into a liability and stop being an asset. And once again the west is ahead of the curve, with low population size and birth rates below 2.1. Once all physical labor is done by machines comparative advantages that have allowed developing countries to catch up will stop working. Instead comparative advantages will shift to countries with cheap resources and most importantly lots of robots and highly integrated industries. Like most technological developments they will ultimately benefit everyone in absolute terms - but will relatively speaking make disparities worse: Ie. the low population, high resources countries (ie. the North) will get even richer, the population rich south will stay poor in comparison.

Rinzler89 2y ago
>Once all physical labor is done by machines Are you sure about the physical labor part? Because I'm yet to see a machine make fruit pickers, plumbers, construction workers, oil & gas workers, landscapers, or caregivers even remotely not viable anymore in the workplace. Meanwhile I'm seeing machines put various graphic designers out of jobs right now. Who's jobs do you think the companies will go after first in the race to replace expensive labor with cheaper automation? The minimum wage burger flippers or migrant fruit pickers barely paid 10$/hour who gets no vacation and sick leave, or, the web developer/graphic designers paid $60+/hour who gets healthcare, paid time off, free meals and massages at work?
- jcfrei 2y ago
  Work that can be done in front of a computer screen will obviously be replaced first, your examples are the jobs that I consider the last ones to be taken over by machines. And that's when my described scenario would take place - not before.
- defrost 2y ago
  All physical labour being done by machine is a bit of a pipe dream for now. What is an actual reality is that more and more physical work is actually being completed by fewer and fewer people. In my lifetime I've seen first hand, since the 1970s, mining and agriculture expand production dramatically with smaller work forces being required through the multiplying magic of SBFM (Seriously Big Flippin' Machines) - Haulpacks, Tractors, Ships, Trucking, Trains, have grown is size; blast patterns for fracturing rock have increased their field sizes, continuous conveyors moving 100s of tonnes per hour have multiplied in parallel. As for fruit picking, maybe look at orchard automation - there are many examples of tight geometric spacings for trees that are robo-mowed to supress weeds and harvested by laying down ground sheets and using hydralic tree shakers to bring down and gather up fruit, etc. Maybe watch more Landline - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline_(TV_series)

jacknews 2y ago

"humanity could have less than a century of current-level innovation left, forever." Why? Instead of maintaining our current massive population, we should seek to improve efficiency. Ensure every child receives a comprehensive education. Ensure every human has time and energy for creative endeavors, rather than just paying the rent. And so on. Population isn't the problem, how we structure society is.

b3lvedere 2y ago
Perhaps it's even more basic nature. Everything alive tries to stay alive and get better, at the expense of anything else, including other living creatures.
rayiner 2y ago
Education doesn’t make people smarter.
- jacknews 2y ago
  Your statement seems to me to assume that our current society discovers the geniuses and transports them magically to caltech, princeton or wherever. I would guess that many are actually making a living fixing tv's in a nairobi slum, or conjuring their own pantheon in a south american jungle, etc, etc.
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FlyingAvatar 2y ago

I would argue the parenting is of much greater value than the birth itself. In general, the better the parenting, the greater the net value of the child to society. > We conclude that the US government should be willing to pay up to $290,000, overall, to each parent who gives birth. This is a weirdly short-sighted suggestion after all that analysis. Getting paid to have children can easily cause the value metric per child to plummet; not to mention the probable suffering caused to the children whose parents might try to abuse it. If you want to increase births, things like subsidizing daycare and after-care and taking steps to ensure the quality of care are helpful. Making the cost of having children lower indirectly is much less likely to be abused. Additionally, if you want to increase the value of children to society, making teaching a more appealing profession (i.e. paying more) and taking steps to ensure the quality of teachers are helpful.

tootie 2y ago
It's really not parenting. A child's future potential is predominantly determined by genetics and environment. Parenting is third place. This is actually backed up by research.
- deleted 2y ago
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ryandrake 2y ago
Exactly. If the US is going to pay to incentivize something, let's not incentivize merely "pumping out kids." Hold the payment until the kid is 21, and only pay the parent(s) if he or she turns out to be an employed non-imprisoned, productive member of society.

cyrnel 2y ago

There are countless (sane) ways for governments to spend $290k to earn $1M back, like funding some promising research, job training programs, building infrastructure, etc.

josefritzishere 2y ago

We should follow Japans lead and liberalise immigration laws. It makes the entire problem moot.

nojvek 2y ago

We are going to be fine. We exploded 10X in a century. A bit of population correction is going to be a bit rough but fine in long term. Fewer healthier wealthier people living sustainably with the planet harnessing vast amounts of energy and automation. That’s a wonderful future to look forward to. Declining birth rates and increasing health spans are humans adjusting to resource constraints.