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The global total fertility rate is already just above your stated ideal rate of 2.1, it's currently at 2.35, so I am really confused at why the comment I origin

by dangus 9mo ago

The global total fertility rate is already just above your stated ideal rate of 2.1, it's currently at 2.35, so I am really confused at why the comment I originally responded to thought we should all shack up and fuck during the pandemic.

somenameforme 9mo ago
I don't think you're discussing in good faith there. Obviously what happens in Chad, Nigeria, and so on has relatively little consequence on what happens in America and the Western world in general.
- dangus 9mo ago
  Please don’t confuse disagreement with discussion in bad faith. I promise you I’m making a serious argument. It has consequence because trade exists. The Western world imports and exports goods to Africa. If the West loses population it doesn’t mean it loses economic output because there are customers and vendors in other countries with higher growth rates. Country boundaries are arbitrary.
  - somenameforme 9mo ago
    Things do not make themselves. Economies scale with population size in both directions - consumption and production. For instance even India will be overcoming the US economy over the next decade or two. That's in large part thanks to their population size. And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are of working age so you get hit with a double whammy there. The age ratios similarly also strongly influence the shape of the economy which will shift to adapt to to the new demographics.
    - dangus 9mo ago
      Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics robots are doing gymnastics routines and speaking in human language using LLMs. I wonder what they’ll be doing in 10 years. I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living standards than Bangladesh and Nigeria. The automotive industry’s production employee count peaked decades ago, despite making more cars than ever before. The amount of labor put into a product has very little to do with its economic value. Are your shoes worth more than RAM chips? Because your shoes take way more manual labor to make per item.
      - somenameforme 9mo ago
        You're only considering superficial last mile manufacturing of stuff - not the entire labor pipeline involved in processes. Going from elemental silicon to RAM requires an absolutely insane amount of labor across a vast array of fields and specializations. And imminent seeming doesn't mean imminent. A decade ago full self driving, let alone for commercial trucking, seemed obvious and imminent. Today, it's not only nowhere to be found but, in many ways, feels even further away than it did a decade ago. A robot doing backflips doesn't inherently foretell revolution ahead, especially as Boston Dynamics bots were doing backflips about a decade ago as well. Yeah they look nicer now, and perhaps in a decade we'll be again observing little more than that they look even nicer still. As for country comparisons, it's not meaningfully possible yet because there's no precedent in modern history for countries going through catastrophic fertility collapse. And it does take some time. For instance Japan is in obvious and severe decline, but they're still at what will be considered 'the good ole days' in the future. So we will get to look on at what's set to come to much of the rest of the world over the coming decades.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
reducesuffering 9mo ago
After Covid and AI progress, I'm constantly bewildered at peoples' consistent inability to extrapolate the immediate following step in a trajectory. Global TFR: 1990–1995=3.31, 1995–2000=2.88, 2000–2005=2.73, 2005-2010=2.62, 2010–2015=2.59, 2015–2020=2.52 Our current 1.6 predicament was just at 2.35

by dangus 9mo ago

somenameforme 9mo ago

I don't think you're discussing in good faith there. Obviously what happens in Chad, Nigeria, and so on has relatively little consequence on what happens in America and the Western world in general.

dangus 9mo ago
Please don’t confuse disagreement with discussion in bad faith. I promise you I’m making a serious argument. It has consequence because trade exists. The Western world imports and exports goods to Africa. If the West loses population it doesn’t mean it loses economic output because there are customers and vendors in other countries with higher growth rates. Country boundaries are arbitrary.
- somenameforme 9mo ago
  Things do not make themselves. Economies scale with population size in both directions - consumption and production. For instance even India will be overcoming the US economy over the next decade or two. That's in large part thanks to their population size. And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are of working age so you get hit with a double whammy there. The age ratios similarly also strongly influence the shape of the economy which will shift to adapt to to the new demographics.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics robots are doing gymnastics routines and speaking in human language using LLMs. I wonder what they’ll be doing in 10 years. I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living standards than Bangladesh and Nigeria. The automotive industry’s production employee count peaked decades ago, despite making more cars than ever before. The amount of labor put into a product has very little to do with its economic value. Are your shoes worth more than RAM chips? Because your shoes take way more manual labor to make per item.
    - somenameforme 9mo ago
      You're only considering superficial last mile manufacturing of stuff - not the entire labor pipeline involved in processes. Going from elemental silicon to RAM requires an absolutely insane amount of labor across a vast array of fields and specializations. And imminent seeming doesn't mean imminent. A decade ago full self driving, let alone for commercial trucking, seemed obvious and imminent. Today, it's not only nowhere to be found but, in many ways, feels even further away than it did a decade ago. A robot doing backflips doesn't inherently foretell revolution ahead, especially as Boston Dynamics bots were doing backflips about a decade ago as well. Yeah they look nicer now, and perhaps in a decade we'll be again observing little more than that they look even nicer still. As for country comparisons, it's not meaningfully possible yet because there's no precedent in modern history for countries going through catastrophic fertility collapse. And it does take some time. For instance Japan is in obvious and severe decline, but they're still at what will be considered 'the good ole days' in the future. So we will get to look on at what's set to come to much of the rest of the world over the coming decades.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]

reducesuffering 9mo ago

After Covid and AI progress, I'm constantly bewildered at peoples' consistent inability to extrapolate the immediate following step in a trajectory. Global TFR: 1990–1995=3.31, 1995–2000=2.88, 2000–2005=2.73, 2005-2010=2.62, 2010–2015=2.59, 2015–2020=2.52 Our current 1.6 predicament was just at 2.35