20 ms·

The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

115 points by akyuu 1y ago

retrocog 1y ago
This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the social welfare state.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  Social welfare state will still exist, it'll just be more costly as drag than it is today (in the US, ~$1.1T/year of uncompensated caregiving occurs, for example). Capitalism is more the challenge, it's built on squeezing the aggregate working age population for profits, and that cohort is in terminal decline over the long term. Between global sovereign debt load [1] and the demand for future profits (slides 31-33 of this PDF), there will be sadness as the future has less and less humans to saddle these economic burdens on. Such are the breaks when you predicate a socioeconomic system on never ending growth, and growth is over because humans globally (for various complex and interwoven issues) are choosing to have less children or no children. [1] https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt ("Global public debt surpasses $100 trillion in 2024.")
  - QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
    A tfr of 1.7, the welfare state will be costly but exist. A tfr of .73 like korea has? Long term, that’s 1 20 year old and 3 45 year olds taking care of half a baby, 7 70 year olds and 10 95 year olds
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      It is what it is. You do the best you can with what you have.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      70 year olds can work, and will have to. Already in many places you have two positively ancient people where one is the caregiver for the other. People make it work because they have to, but the pressure of taking care of even more will further reduce the desire to get ahead - that has another mouth to feed.
- rwyinuse 1y ago
  That depends very much on how technology progresses during coming decades. If we get something like AGI, then having less working age people may be a good thing, because there will be much, much less demand for white collar workers at least. In the mid 2000's when I was a kid, at school I was taught that there would be a HUGE labour shortage once certain large generations retire, as younger generations are much smaller. Guess what, they retired a decade ago, and yet my country has the second highest unemployment rate in EU, with a very weak job market for fresh graduates in particular. Increased efficiency & automation ate all those jobs, nobody was hired to replace many of the boomers who retired. I doubt the future will be any different.
- seydor 1y ago
  societies and states have been doing fine without welfare for centuries
  - bondarchuk 1y ago
    "doing fine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
  - XorNot 1y ago
    The sheer confidence with which someone working a white collar desk job posts this in the AI age is astounding.
  - ponector 1y ago
    Societies and states have been doing fine without medicines, without electricity and with slavery for centuries. Doesn't mean we need to get back there.
api 1y ago
Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
- profstasiak 1y ago
  how is Paul Ehrlich linked to the original post? what is he wrong about?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - UncleMeat 1y ago
    Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve completely to death with no aid). He believed that the sustainable population for the planet was one billion. He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."
    - api 1y ago
      Unfortunately a lot of people are now saying we need extreme curtailing of rights -- largely womens' rights -- because of underpopulation. The answer to every panic is always curtailing of rights. Scary thing may happen therefore we need big alpha ape to fix it for us by bashing people on head with big rock. Grunt, grunt.
Arainach 1y ago
The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
- api 1y ago
  The thing that collapses in a negative population growth environment is passive earnings from interest and asset appreciation, retirement, and to some extent social welfare states. The whole idea of things like social security is predicated on a growing population paying for the elderly. It's also very, very bearish for things like real estate long term. We are probably still in a real estate bubble. I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall about this since I was in my twenties. I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like climate change and natural resource depletion.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    Social security is solvent for at least the next 75 years if the US removes the payroll cap on contributions from wage income. We choose not to. The economic resources exist for these social programs, it will just diminish profits (the horror /s). It's a policy choice. Every year total fertility rate remains lower than replacement rate further locks in the fertility curve, but there is no political will or desire to implement the fixes required. So, we keep kicking the can until we cannot anymore. It's unfortunate. Demographic destiny comes regardless, as each year total fertility rate continues to fall. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-social-security-is-it-sustainable/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-... https://www.pgpf.org/article/social-security-reform-options-to-raise-revenues/ https://www.pgpf.org/article/social-security-reform-options-...
    - rayiner 1y ago
      By 2075, Medicare and Social Security will reach a over 14% of GDP combined, up from around 8% today. To pay that, we'll have to raise taxes by $1.75 trillion using today's GDP figures. That will require just about doubling payroll taxes from the present level. That's probably an underestimate. As population shrinks, GDP will shrink as well, unless we have large gains in productivity, which have stalled. It's not clear to me that the projections about SS/Medicare as a percentage of GDP account for the effect of GDP shrinking due to population decline. CBO assumes a stable population through 2060, using quite arbitrary assumptions about immigration: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875.
jmclnx 1y ago
This is all well and good, but population dropping will only impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact. Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping. The much larger worry should be Climate Change, a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the population falling. Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling resources. EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big fear, the rich may have to start paying more.
- Qem 1y ago
  > For the poor, it will have no real impact. It will likely bring back the problem of old age destitution as rule, not exception. It's a previously common scourge that never went completely away[1][2], but went into the sidelines by early-mid XX century, and is set to coming back with a vengeance, by the time current people in their 20s-30s reach old age. It hits the poor hard. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/successful-educated-but-now-destitutewhy-the-problem-of-senior-poverty-in-america-should-scare-you-11625249065 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/successful-educated-but-no... [2] https://citizenmatters.in/mumbai-abandoned-destitute-elderly/ https://citizenmatters.in/mumbai-abandoned-destitute-elderly...
- chrisco255 1y ago
  The history of the world and economics is far more nuanced than rich people hoarding wealth. Wealth is the economy, it's created from systems. The feudal system in the medieval age was relatively poor at generating wealth. A series of technological and intellectual developments began to rapidly increase in the 1400s that culminated in the modern era, including especially the printing press. But in the 1300s serfdom was still the norm in Europe. Serfs did not get paid and so the Plague made no difference except 2/3 of the population died. Serfdom would last another several hundred years after the plague, and in some countries all the way to the 20th century.
baron816 1y ago
The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.
- seydor 1y ago
  if we have all those robots doing everything for us, why do we need children?
  - coldtea 1y ago
    If we have all those robots doing everything we are we needed? We could just kill ourselves, since we don't seem to care much for life, reproduction, and all that.
- ch4s3 1y ago
  The mid-century Baby Boom came after WWII, and probably had very little to do with technology. The upswing started some time in late 1944 to mid 1945 as combat was winding down in Europe and a lot of young men were returning home. Otherwise fertility has been declining steadily since 1800 in western countries.
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    No, this is exactly the opposite of true: you need to do more reading about the baby boom. It happened across many countries, including ones which had little involvement in WWII, and in almost all cases it began in the 1930s, even with the Great Depression underway. It got supercharged by the end of the war because that's when the economic doldrums finally ended, but upward trend in fertility predated even the beginning of the war, never mind the end.
    - chrisco255 1y ago
      https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-us-1800-2020/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-u... The above shows the boom started in the 40s in the U.S. after 140 years of gradual decline.
bArray 1y ago
> Don’t we care about output per capita? Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down. > Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but... > our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output. Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated. > We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this. > Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government. This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system. > Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder. Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth? > Affordable housing: Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.
- gddgb 1y ago
  [dead]
giantg2 1y ago
Little mention of automation in the labor discussion. Also, no real discussion of the consumerism aspect of the economy when talking about worker productivity. Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.
rayiner 1y ago
The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand: > Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government. According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-denmark https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
- lynx97 1y ago
  Intuitvely, those opposing immigration have always known this. But tell that t someone from the left They will verbally kill you for stating obvious facts.
  - mattnewton 1y ago
    Intuition alone really isn't to be trusted with public policy decisions of this magnitude.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      I agree, but shouldn’t the burden be on the people advocating mass immigration to prove it helps?
      - Analemma_ 1y ago
        No, because freedom of movement and commerce (specifically, selling one's labor) are human rights. No right is absolute, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
        rayiner 1y ago
        There is no “human right” to cross national borders. It’s the opposite. International law recognizes both the collective right of “peoples”—groups of people—to form nations, and the right of nations to their territorial integrity.
Animats 1y ago
The future is probably a society with more robots than humans. We can see this happening now at Amazon. Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis. Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots. Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that. How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway. [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-of-amazon-workforce/ https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-o...
- robots0only 1y ago
  The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B). Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.
  - Animats 1y ago
    The simple Kiva mobile platforms are most of the robot count, but they replaced large numbers of people who did walk around warehouses moving stuff from A to B.
  - rangestransform 1y ago
    IIRC Amazon laid off the entire team that was working on manipulation research at the Boston area Amazon Robotics
    - Animats 1y ago
      They did? Amazon has recently been showing their Vulkan picking robot, and Aaron Parness still seems to be at Amazon.
TrackerFF 1y ago
Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly living off their state pension. As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree, too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7 more years to reproduce. I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. We're currently trending towards a birth rate of 1 or less. This means 4/5 will be retirees in three generations. Your 1/3 figure is wildly optimistic. Little chance it will be that good.
- XorNot 1y ago
  A substantial realignment in the economy is what's coming. The charge will be when the rate of vacated homes starts to uptick as their aren't enough capable people to live in them: right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand, but those retirement figures imply a different reality as time goes on: eventually those people start going into care facilities, but their won't be nearly enough people around to supply the demand for the properties they're finally moving out from. The real markets are absolutely not ready for that reality.
  - sharadov 1y ago
    Case in point - Japan, with so many abandoned homes
    - renox 1y ago
      In the countryside, I doubt that this is the case in Tokyo.
  - 1y ago
chockablocker 1y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk Recorded talk for the slides in this post.
rendang 1y ago
The selection effects of this transition will be really fascinating to see after the fact. The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids", but is being subjected for the first time to "having more kids while extreme prosperity and modern telecommunications exist" which is a very different thing.
- api 1y ago
  I had an evolutionary bio professor in college say this: "you don't understand evolution until you understand how contraception could lead to overpopulation." Anything placed in the path of reproduction is a barrier to be overcome. If there is anything in the human genome that correlates with a positive desire to choose to have children, we are selecting hard for that right now. We may see a bottleneck this century and then a gigantic population explosion next century as a result, with a world full of people with very loud "biological clocks" who just adore and crave babies. That is assuming this is genetically determined enough to be a target for selection. There are probably correlates that are, and I could speculate endlessly about what they are, but I also know that such speculations are likely to be wrong because these systems are complex and often counter-intuitive. One I've speculated about recently is negativity bias. It seems to me that a lot of people choosing not to have kids right now are doing so because of negativity bias, because they see the world as a terrible place as a result of their consumption of negative media. Historically negativity bias may be something that's been selected for, but this may now have flipped. Optimists may have higher fitness now while pessimists did pre-industrialization and pre-modernity. But again, speculation.
  - Zacharias030 1y ago
    What do you / your prof think about the timelines though? I always heard people shoot these kinds of arguments down by saying that evolution does not significantly operate on our accelerated timelines of human technology.
    - api 1y ago
      How long an evolutionary change takes can vary widely depending on a ton of factors: current makeup of the gene pool, strength of selection, whether it's a single or multiple gene trait, whether and to what extent there are counter-pressures selecting in the other way, and so on. It's very hard to say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution
deleted 1y ago
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A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong. The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M. You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.) Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging. Then there are obvious economic measures, etc. The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.
- testing22321 1y ago
  I drove right around Africa through 35 countries over three years. I drove across both Nigeria and the DRC. There are dozens and dozens of massive cities that take hours to cross in Nigeria you’ve never heard of. Anecdotally, it’s way, way, way more populous than anything nearby. Ethiopia felt somewhat similar in parts, as did Egypt.
  - A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
    Can you name a few of them in Nigeria? On satellite imaging, from what I've seen, they're not so massive, and they're mostly comprised of a sprawl of 1-3 story buildings. We can compare vs. cities that we have good numbers for. Or Chinese/Indian cities, for that matter. (After looking at Nigeria or the DRC, a quick glance at India via satellite imaging is shocking.) That said, Egypt is very populous, there's no doubt about that one.
    - testing22321 1y ago
stego-tech 1y ago
Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-decline-and-so-can-you/ https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de... Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more. And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate. But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society. Just some rambling, don't mind me.
neehao 1y ago
one small thing = https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BFI_WP_2024-140.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BFI_WP_2... and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”
LAC-Tech 1y ago
I feel like slide 39 would have gotten you chased out of polite society 10 years ago. A lot of western countries economies are built on sustained mass migration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Arguably the United States where both parties champion it (turn the other check to illegal migraiton of the democrats VS mass H1B visas of the republicans). As this study points out, it's not sustainable.
thewanderer1983 1y ago
The last line of the slide reads "Once you start thinking about these issues, it is hard to think about anything else: demography is destiny." Raoul Pal primary thesis about macroeconomics is that Demographics is everything. Here is a 54 second video of him highlighting that issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJm_zFbIqPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJm_zFbIqPE
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  GDP = people * productivity I’m super interested on the economic modeling when every society is shrinking. In that case, the best index fund will be the one that shrinks the slowest. This will happen about 10 years after the average reader here dies.
cubefox 1y ago
When I posted the same result a few weeks ago, it got [flagged] in short order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520297
- Ericson2314 1y ago
  I'm sorry that happened to you, but the Atlantic is such a troll, I can understand why it was flagged.
  - cubefox 1y ago
    The article was not a "troll".
    - Ericson2314 1y ago
      That one was it their worst, but I'm saying the publican in general has a bad rep. Leading with the debt scare is not good either (yes the slides also mentioned that). It's conflating layers of abstraction to talk about a people shortage, and issuing debt. Money doesn't create more people, after all.
Beijinger 1y ago
Ugo Bardi has a post: https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/what-if-malthus-was-right https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/what-if-malthus-was-righ...
pmarreck 1y ago
Maybe expecting every single person to work and no one to homestead and care for the kids, within a system that explicitly does not support families, was a mistake. (Please note that I did not gender the roles. My best friend is a stay-at-home dad and he is amazing. They can afford to do this, though, because his wife's compensation is extremely high.)
- nradov 1y ago
  Expectations are part of it, but regardless of compensation or lack thereof it turns out that a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children. Child rearing is essential, and rewarding in many ways. But it's also exhausting, repetitive, and frustrating. It's not surprising that given the choice many adults would rather spend time around other adults instead of children. In the past most societies kind of "solved" this inherent problem by artificially restricting women's but obviously that's not acceptable or even feasible now.
  - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
    > a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children Or they think that they do, due to what the zeitgeist urges. We can never really know.
    - thrance 1y ago
      What's the difference? People want what they want, it's always been this way. No one makes life choices in a cultural vacuum.
      - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
        The difference is that in one case it could be recognised and avoided, if beneficial for both the individual & society.
        lotsofpulp 1y ago
Ericson2314 1y ago
I think it's gonna be fine. The capital per person (capital deepening) will be great. Things that prove hard to automate will suffer — maybe elder care can't be automated and will go to shit — but a lot of stuff can be automated.
- triceratops 1y ago
  +100 climate change is the more immediate Big Global Problem. Let's fix that first then figure this one out.
protocolture 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1... We must act IMMEDIATELY to secure london from this great tidal wave of horse manure.
riphay 1y ago
Link to the keynote presentation, fills a lot of the gaps in the slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk
defyonce 1y ago
if humans stop age and live for thousands years, then there is no need for specific replacement rate. Alternative, make it possible to have kids without heavy burden on the woman body. Alternative, make it possible to become pregnant at 50-60 years. This is all research vectors that we should work on, and not doom on hypothetical what ifs in the future!
thrance 1y ago
I'm quite tired of this topic being brought up all the time. What's the solution? We've seen that economic incentives won't do, so what? Force women to have children? Punish celibates? Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended), the "solutions" to this "crisis" are worse than the outcome. Look on the bright side, a declining demography makes human activity that much more sustainable, and maybe our descendants won't even have to worry about restricting their carbon emissions to keep the planet inhabitable. In the meantime, we'll have to take a cut to our way of life, which I can live with. We don't need to travel to the other side of the globe yearly, we don't need three cars per household, etc. It's quite telling that the people most concerned with this usually self-label as "pro-markets libertarians". Is market health more important than bodily autonomy? What happened to freedom?
tsoukase 1y ago
Everything is hostile to having kids. High consumer prices and house rents, media and celebrities advertising short term pleasures, big city way of life in anonymity entertaining alone until death, latest social trends in gender roles, low state financial support to families. There must take place fundamental social reforms in order to reverse this path. The most important is to create working mothers and not dynamic but single women.
neaden 1y ago
I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right. I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.
- tartoran 1y ago
  One is bad for the the earth, the other is bad for the economy.
  - w0de0 1y ago
    Bad for our present (grotesque?) ecology - not bad for the Earth, nor bad for her resident life. (If humanity decimated itself via overpopulation, Earth & her life - likely even class Mammalia - would be rather better for it, by any metric besides net intelligence.)
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  The thing is, the people who were saying that were wrong even at the time. Fertility was already declining in the late 60s when The Population Bomb was released, but population was still increasing from the earlier boom, in the same way your car will continue coasting up the hill for a little while even after you release the accelerator. People were freaking out about absolute numbers, instead of extrapolating trends for the data they already had, because they were being actively misled by folks like Ehrlich. So this is less "we believed one wrong thing, are we now believing a second wrong thing?" than "we believed one wrong thing, and corrected it to what we should have known all along".
- tuatoru 1y ago
  >I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. Moral: Journalists are stupid and ignorant, and you should always keep in mind Gell-Mann amnesia, and go to the source papers.

115 points by akyuu 1y ago

retrocog 1y ago

This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the social welfare state.

toomuchtodo 1y ago
Social welfare state will still exist, it'll just be more costly as drag than it is today (in the US, ~$1.1T/year of uncompensated caregiving occurs, for example). Capitalism is more the challenge, it's built on squeezing the aggregate working age population for profits, and that cohort is in terminal decline over the long term. Between global sovereign debt load [1] and the demand for future profits (slides 31-33 of this PDF), there will be sadness as the future has less and less humans to saddle these economic burdens on. Such are the breaks when you predicate a socioeconomic system on never ending growth, and growth is over because humans globally (for various complex and interwoven issues) are choosing to have less children or no children. [1] https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt ("Global public debt surpasses $100 trillion in 2024.")
- QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
  A tfr of 1.7, the welfare state will be costly but exist. A tfr of .73 like korea has? Long term, that’s 1 20 year old and 3 45 year olds taking care of half a baby, 7 70 year olds and 10 95 year olds
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    It is what it is. You do the best you can with what you have.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    70 year olds can work, and will have to. Already in many places you have two positively ancient people where one is the caregiver for the other. People make it work because they have to, but the pressure of taking care of even more will further reduce the desire to get ahead - that has another mouth to feed.
rwyinuse 1y ago
That depends very much on how technology progresses during coming decades. If we get something like AGI, then having less working age people may be a good thing, because there will be much, much less demand for white collar workers at least. In the mid 2000's when I was a kid, at school I was taught that there would be a HUGE labour shortage once certain large generations retire, as younger generations are much smaller. Guess what, they retired a decade ago, and yet my country has the second highest unemployment rate in EU, with a very weak job market for fresh graduates in particular. Increased efficiency & automation ate all those jobs, nobody was hired to replace many of the boomers who retired. I doubt the future will be any different.
seydor 1y ago
societies and states have been doing fine without welfare for centuries
- bondarchuk 1y ago
  "doing fine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
- XorNot 1y ago
  The sheer confidence with which someone working a white collar desk job posts this in the AI age is astounding.
- ponector 1y ago
  Societies and states have been doing fine without medicines, without electricity and with slavery for centuries. Doesn't mean we need to get back there.

api 1y ago

Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.

profstasiak 1y ago
how is Paul Ehrlich linked to the original post? what is he wrong about?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve completely to death with no aid). He believed that the sustainable population for the planet was one billion. He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."
  - api 1y ago
    Unfortunately a lot of people are now saying we need extreme curtailing of rights -- largely womens' rights -- because of underpopulation. The answer to every panic is always curtailing of rights. Scary thing may happen therefore we need big alpha ape to fix it for us by bashing people on head with big rock. Grunt, grunt.

Arainach 1y ago

The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.

api 1y ago
The thing that collapses in a negative population growth environment is passive earnings from interest and asset appreciation, retirement, and to some extent social welfare states. The whole idea of things like social security is predicated on a growing population paying for the elderly. It's also very, very bearish for things like real estate long term. We are probably still in a real estate bubble. I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall about this since I was in my twenties. I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like climate change and natural resource depletion.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  Social security is solvent for at least the next 75 years if the US removes the payroll cap on contributions from wage income. We choose not to. The economic resources exist for these social programs, it will just diminish profits (the horror /s). It's a policy choice. Every year total fertility rate remains lower than replacement rate further locks in the fertility curve, but there is no political will or desire to implement the fixes required. So, we keep kicking the can until we cannot anymore. It's unfortunate. Demographic destiny comes regardless, as each year total fertility rate continues to fall. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-social-security-is-it-sustainable/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-... https://www.pgpf.org/article/social-security-reform-options-to-raise-revenues/ https://www.pgpf.org/article/social-security-reform-options-...
  - rayiner 1y ago
    By 2075, Medicare and Social Security will reach a over 14% of GDP combined, up from around 8% today. To pay that, we'll have to raise taxes by $1.75 trillion using today's GDP figures. That will require just about doubling payroll taxes from the present level. That's probably an underestimate. As population shrinks, GDP will shrink as well, unless we have large gains in productivity, which have stalled. It's not clear to me that the projections about SS/Medicare as a percentage of GDP account for the effect of GDP shrinking due to population decline. CBO assumes a stable population through 2060, using quite arbitrary assumptions about immigration: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875.

jmclnx 1y ago

This is all well and good, but population dropping will only impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact. Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping. The much larger worry should be Climate Change, a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the population falling. Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling resources. EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big fear, the rich may have to start paying more.

Qem 1y ago
> For the poor, it will have no real impact. It will likely bring back the problem of old age destitution as rule, not exception. It's a previously common scourge that never went completely away[1][2], but went into the sidelines by early-mid XX century, and is set to coming back with a vengeance, by the time current people in their 20s-30s reach old age. It hits the poor hard. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/successful-educated-but-now-destitutewhy-the-problem-of-senior-poverty-in-america-should-scare-you-11625249065 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/successful-educated-but-no... [2] https://citizenmatters.in/mumbai-abandoned-destitute-elderly/ https://citizenmatters.in/mumbai-abandoned-destitute-elderly...
chrisco255 1y ago
The history of the world and economics is far more nuanced than rich people hoarding wealth. Wealth is the economy, it's created from systems. The feudal system in the medieval age was relatively poor at generating wealth. A series of technological and intellectual developments began to rapidly increase in the 1400s that culminated in the modern era, including especially the printing press. But in the 1300s serfdom was still the norm in Europe. Serfs did not get paid and so the Plague made no difference except 2/3 of the population died. Serfdom would last another several hundred years after the plague, and in some countries all the way to the 20th century.

baron816 1y ago

The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.

seydor 1y ago
if we have all those robots doing everything for us, why do we need children?
- coldtea 1y ago
  If we have all those robots doing everything we are we needed? We could just kill ourselves, since we don't seem to care much for life, reproduction, and all that.
ch4s3 1y ago
The mid-century Baby Boom came after WWII, and probably had very little to do with technology. The upswing started some time in late 1944 to mid 1945 as combat was winding down in Europe and a lot of young men were returning home. Otherwise fertility has been declining steadily since 1800 in western countries.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  No, this is exactly the opposite of true: you need to do more reading about the baby boom. It happened across many countries, including ones which had little involvement in WWII, and in almost all cases it began in the 1930s, even with the Great Depression underway. It got supercharged by the end of the war because that's when the economic doldrums finally ended, but upward trend in fertility predated even the beginning of the war, never mind the end.
  - chrisco255 1y ago
    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-us-1800-2020/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-u... The above shows the boom started in the 40s in the U.S. after 140 years of gradual decline.

bArray 1y ago

> Don’t we care about output per capita? Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down. > Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but... > our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output. Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated. > We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this. > Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government. This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system. > Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder. Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth? > Affordable housing: Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.

gddgb 1y ago
[dead]

giantg2 1y ago

Little mention of automation in the labor discussion. Also, no real discussion of the consumerism aspect of the economy when talking about worker productivity. Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.

rayiner 1y ago

The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand: > Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government. According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-denmark https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...

lynx97 1y ago
Intuitvely, those opposing immigration have always known this. But tell that t someone from the left They will verbally kill you for stating obvious facts.
- mattnewton 1y ago
  Intuition alone really isn't to be trusted with public policy decisions of this magnitude.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    I agree, but shouldn’t the burden be on the people advocating mass immigration to prove it helps?
    - Analemma_ 1y ago
      No, because freedom of movement and commerce (specifically, selling one's labor) are human rights. No right is absolute, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
      - rayiner 1y ago
        There is no “human right” to cross national borders. It’s the opposite. International law recognizes both the collective right of “peoples”—groups of people—to form nations, and the right of nations to their territorial integrity.

Animats 1y ago

The future is probably a society with more robots than humans. We can see this happening now at Amazon. Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis. Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots. Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that. How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway. [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-of-amazon-workforce/ https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-o...

robots0only 1y ago
The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B). Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.
- Animats 1y ago
  The simple Kiva mobile platforms are most of the robot count, but they replaced large numbers of people who did walk around warehouses moving stuff from A to B.
- rangestransform 1y ago
  IIRC Amazon laid off the entire team that was working on manipulation research at the Boston area Amazon Robotics
  - Animats 1y ago
    They did? Amazon has recently been showing their Vulkan picking robot, and Aaron Parness still seems to be at Amazon.

TrackerFF 1y ago

Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly living off their state pension. As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree, too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7 more years to reproduce. I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.

otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. We're currently trending towards a birth rate of 1 or less. This means 4/5 will be retirees in three generations. Your 1/3 figure is wildly optimistic. Little chance it will be that good.
XorNot 1y ago
A substantial realignment in the economy is what's coming. The charge will be when the rate of vacated homes starts to uptick as their aren't enough capable people to live in them: right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand, but those retirement figures imply a different reality as time goes on: eventually those people start going into care facilities, but their won't be nearly enough people around to supply the demand for the properties they're finally moving out from. The real markets are absolutely not ready for that reality.
- sharadov 1y ago
  Case in point - Japan, with so many abandoned homes
  - renox 1y ago
    In the countryside, I doubt that this is the case in Tokyo.
- 1y ago

chockablocker 1y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk Recorded talk for the slides in this post.

rendang 1y ago

The selection effects of this transition will be really fascinating to see after the fact. The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids", but is being subjected for the first time to "having more kids while extreme prosperity and modern telecommunications exist" which is a very different thing.

api 1y ago
I had an evolutionary bio professor in college say this: "you don't understand evolution until you understand how contraception could lead to overpopulation." Anything placed in the path of reproduction is a barrier to be overcome. If there is anything in the human genome that correlates with a positive desire to choose to have children, we are selecting hard for that right now. We may see a bottleneck this century and then a gigantic population explosion next century as a result, with a world full of people with very loud "biological clocks" who just adore and crave babies. That is assuming this is genetically determined enough to be a target for selection. There are probably correlates that are, and I could speculate endlessly about what they are, but I also know that such speculations are likely to be wrong because these systems are complex and often counter-intuitive. One I've speculated about recently is negativity bias. It seems to me that a lot of people choosing not to have kids right now are doing so because of negativity bias, because they see the world as a terrible place as a result of their consumption of negative media. Historically negativity bias may be something that's been selected for, but this may now have flipped. Optimists may have higher fitness now while pessimists did pre-industrialization and pre-modernity. But again, speculation.
- Zacharias030 1y ago
  What do you / your prof think about the timelines though? I always heard people shoot these kinds of arguments down by saying that evolution does not significantly operate on our accelerated timelines of human technology.
  - api 1y ago
    How long an evolutionary change takes can vary widely depending on a ton of factors: current makeup of the gene pool, strength of selection, whether it's a single or multiple gene trait, whether and to what extent there are counter-pressures selecting in the other way, and so on. It's very hard to say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

A_D_E_P_T 1y ago

I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong. The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M. You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.) Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging. Then there are obvious economic measures, etc. The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.

testing22321 1y ago
I drove right around Africa through 35 countries over three years. I drove across both Nigeria and the DRC. There are dozens and dozens of massive cities that take hours to cross in Nigeria you’ve never heard of. Anecdotally, it’s way, way, way more populous than anything nearby. Ethiopia felt somewhat similar in parts, as did Egypt.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
  Can you name a few of them in Nigeria? On satellite imaging, from what I've seen, they're not so massive, and they're mostly comprised of a sprawl of 1-3 story buildings. We can compare vs. cities that we have good numbers for. Or Chinese/Indian cities, for that matter. (After looking at Nigeria or the DRC, a quick glance at India via satellite imaging is shocking.) That said, Egypt is very populous, there's no doubt about that one.
  - testing22321 1y ago

stego-tech 1y ago

Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-decline-and-so-can-you/ https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de... Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more. And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.

h2zizzle 1y ago
I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate. But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society. Just some rambling, don't mind me.

neehao 1y ago

one small thing = https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BFI_WP_2024-140.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BFI_WP_2... and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”

LAC-Tech 1y ago

I feel like slide 39 would have gotten you chased out of polite society 10 years ago. A lot of western countries economies are built on sustained mass migration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Arguably the United States where both parties champion it (turn the other check to illegal migraiton of the democrats VS mass H1B visas of the republicans). As this study points out, it's not sustainable.

thewanderer1983 1y ago

The last line of the slide reads "Once you start thinking about these issues, it is hard to think about anything else: demography is destiny." Raoul Pal primary thesis about macroeconomics is that Demographics is everything. Here is a 54 second video of him highlighting that issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJm_zFbIqPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJm_zFbIqPE

mensetmanusman 1y ago
GDP = people * productivity I’m super interested on the economic modeling when every society is shrinking. In that case, the best index fund will be the one that shrinks the slowest. This will happen about 10 years after the average reader here dies.

cubefox 1y ago

When I posted the same result a few weeks ago, it got [flagged] in short order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520297

Ericson2314 1y ago
I'm sorry that happened to you, but the Atlantic is such a troll, I can understand why it was flagged.
- cubefox 1y ago
  The article was not a "troll".
  - Ericson2314 1y ago
    That one was it their worst, but I'm saying the publican in general has a bad rep. Leading with the debt scare is not good either (yes the slides also mentioned that). It's conflating layers of abstraction to talk about a people shortage, and issuing debt. Money doesn't create more people, after all.

Beijinger 1y ago

Ugo Bardi has a post: https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/what-if-malthus-was-right https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/what-if-malthus-was-righ...

pmarreck 1y ago

Maybe expecting every single person to work and no one to homestead and care for the kids, within a system that explicitly does not support families, was a mistake. (Please note that I did not gender the roles. My best friend is a stay-at-home dad and he is amazing. They can afford to do this, though, because his wife's compensation is extremely high.)

nradov 1y ago
Expectations are part of it, but regardless of compensation or lack thereof it turns out that a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children. Child rearing is essential, and rewarding in many ways. But it's also exhausting, repetitive, and frustrating. It's not surprising that given the choice many adults would rather spend time around other adults instead of children. In the past most societies kind of "solved" this inherent problem by artificially restricting women's but obviously that's not acceptable or even feasible now.
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago
  > a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children Or they think that they do, due to what the zeitgeist urges. We can never really know.
  - thrance 1y ago
    What's the difference? People want what they want, it's always been this way. No one makes life choices in a cultural vacuum.
    - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
      The difference is that in one case it could be recognised and avoided, if beneficial for both the individual & society.
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago

Ericson2314 1y ago

I think it's gonna be fine. The capital per person (capital deepening) will be great. Things that prove hard to automate will suffer — maybe elder care can't be automated and will go to shit — but a lot of stuff can be automated.

triceratops 1y ago
+100 climate change is the more immediate Big Global Problem. Let's fix that first then figure this one out.

protocolture 1y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1... We must act IMMEDIATELY to secure london from this great tidal wave of horse manure.

riphay 1y ago

Link to the keynote presentation, fills a lot of the gaps in the slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk

defyonce 1y ago

if humans stop age and live for thousands years, then there is no need for specific replacement rate. Alternative, make it possible to have kids without heavy burden on the woman body. Alternative, make it possible to become pregnant at 50-60 years. This is all research vectors that we should work on, and not doom on hypothetical what ifs in the future!

thrance 1y ago

I'm quite tired of this topic being brought up all the time. What's the solution? We've seen that economic incentives won't do, so what? Force women to have children? Punish celibates? Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended), the "solutions" to this "crisis" are worse than the outcome. Look on the bright side, a declining demography makes human activity that much more sustainable, and maybe our descendants won't even have to worry about restricting their carbon emissions to keep the planet inhabitable. In the meantime, we'll have to take a cut to our way of life, which I can live with. We don't need to travel to the other side of the globe yearly, we don't need three cars per household, etc. It's quite telling that the people most concerned with this usually self-label as "pro-markets libertarians". Is market health more important than bodily autonomy? What happened to freedom?

tsoukase 1y ago

Everything is hostile to having kids. High consumer prices and house rents, media and celebrities advertising short term pleasures, big city way of life in anonymity entertaining alone until death, latest social trends in gender roles, low state financial support to families. There must take place fundamental social reforms in order to reverse this path. The most important is to create working mothers and not dynamic but single women.

neaden 1y ago

I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right. I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.

tartoran 1y ago
One is bad for the the earth, the other is bad for the economy.
- w0de0 1y ago
  Bad for our present (grotesque?) ecology - not bad for the Earth, nor bad for her resident life. (If humanity decimated itself via overpopulation, Earth & her life - likely even class Mammalia - would be rather better for it, by any metric besides net intelligence.)
Analemma_ 1y ago
The thing is, the people who were saying that were wrong even at the time. Fertility was already declining in the late 60s when The Population Bomb was released, but population was still increasing from the earlier boom, in the same way your car will continue coasting up the hill for a little while even after you release the accelerator. People were freaking out about absolute numbers, instead of extrapolating trends for the data they already had, because they were being actively misled by folks like Ehrlich. So this is less "we believed one wrong thing, are we now believing a second wrong thing?" than "we believed one wrong thing, and corrected it to what we should have known all along".
tuatoru 1y ago
>I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. Moral: Journalists are stupid and ignorant, and you should always keep in mind Gell-Mann amnesia, and go to the source papers.