Population growth expands general demand and markets, and really sustains some industries (construction, for instance), but is not sustainable, indeed.
If population growth stalls or even if population shrinks then the overall economic output will do the same. But IMHO that is not important, what is important for people is the economic output per capita and as such I think it's possible for people's lives to continue to improve.
Most first world countries have an infatuation with construction and property that seems unsustainable, especially as property prices rise and land ownership continues consolidating up the economic ladder.
A few countries have caught themselves in a bubble, and my country in particular (Australia) does everything it can to make sure it doesn't pop. There are numerous government grants for home-buyers, every time we have a financial crisis it's the construction and banking industries that get all the grants and bailouts, and even during the various COVID lockdowns there have been schemes to prop up construction. Government and council platforms are almost always based around construction projects, rarely reform or social programs.
I get why, without these schemes, the house of cards would come falling down. But at some point endless construction will have to slow down, and we'll need to make a more sustainable relationship with construction and property.
My theory is that we cannot because we don't share and prosper together. We have "trickle down" economics, which IMO means current economic incentives are pyramid shaped.
In order for the pyramid to grow in size, the people at the top consonantly need more people at the bottom, consuming, to keep it growing.
If the economy was "rounder" and more directly beneficial to everyone, it would be less necessary to have more consumers / population growth.
In principle, but if economic growth is still physically possible then anyone trying to stall it within their zone of political influence just gives relative power to those who don’t.
> Can we achieve prosperity without economic growth?
It's extremely difficult. Progress is almost always related to new products and services. Imagine developing those under the constraint of no economic growth. "We can't grow economically, so we can't develop this new vaccine unless we close all the coffee shops in town."
> Because at a point, we sure can't have prosperity with continuous population growth.
That's a different thing. In theory, one can have economic growth without population growth, at least for a time and in certain range. The economists call it "productivity"[1]; it measures how big is the lever that each worker uses to produce. I guess that we could, with the current population of Earth, have sustained economic growth without population growth for centuries, just by equalizing-up productivity across all population sectors and countries.
With that said, even the current human population of Earth is quite a stress on the planet. In the best world, we would find more and better places to live, so that we can leave our planet be and have the freedom to have families as big or small as we like.
Therefore some of the things that we've done in an effort to make the economy more innovative has probably made it more difficult for anyone to have children. In particular, allowing the better paying jobs to concentrate into a few dozen cities means that many people now face the painful choice, either they stay in their home region, where they would have support raising a family, or they move to one of those cities, where they can have a good paying career, but where they will lack support.
Outside of a few dozen affluent cities wages have been falling to such an extent that low paying jobs have had less and less attraction for poorer women. Women's participation in the labor force hit its peak in the late 1990s and has been in decline since 2000. Many families are simply working less and therefore contracting their standard of living. (Obviously, we need less money if we are willing to live with less. In particular, we've seen the re-emergence of multi-generational households, something that had largely disappeared during the affluent years of the early and mid 20th Century).
There have been many cultural changes that make it impossible for us to ever get back to anything like Baby Boom levels of children. For instance, the impact of high levels of divorce:
There was also the backlash against government services, in all of the Western democracies after 1980 (give or take a few years depending on the country) which taught a whole generation of parents that a given program, offering crucial support, might suddenly be withdrawn, and that generation of parents taught their children to be wary of depending too much on any source of support which might suddenly disappear.
But it's worth considering, the world is over-populated, so in many ways it is terrific that people are having less children. Less children means that 100 years from now there will be less strain on the environment. We simply need to be willing to adjust to slower economic growth.
>Less children means that 100 years from now there will be less strain on the environment
Population growth is influenced by other factors than reproduction, namely immigration. I don't think it makes much sense to consider the environnmental aspect of population growth on a national level.
You contradict yourself. Less children born in one nation means less children at the global level but not necessarily at the national level because of immigration. My environmental commentary is about the global level.
Great news. we already have 7 billion+ ppl on the planet. Can we let other species breath for a few seconds. Screw the 'economic driver' and scaremongering.
Fertility rate and population growth aren't the same thing.
Population growth is also influenced by life expectancy and immigration/emmigration.
I can also assure you that population growth trends are NOT the same everywhere. The West is approaching a new equilibrium, but places like Africa are still seeing tons of growth. I really encourage everyone to look up Hans Rosling on youtube. His lectures are highly informative and easy to follow.
One underrated reason for this is the decline in religion among the youth. Gen Z and Millennials are two of the least religious generations ever in the US, with Gen Z being roughly 50% irreligious.
This has a huge impact because the birth rates for irreligious people are very low. The total fertility rate in the US for irreligious women is only 1.4 children per woman compared to 2.2 children per woman for religious women.
The fundamental issue here is incentives. Raising children is a lot of work and a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive.
Of course. The drive to have a child has nothing to do with economic stability and access to affordable housing, health care, food, schooling and the ability to have a good enough work/life balance that allows a parent to actually participate to the children’s education and development.
No, no, it’s about this hedonistic godless culture that’s eating away at our “precious bodily fluids”.
While the argument is not implausible, the secularisation is part of such a huge societal change that it imho difficult to argue causation. A ton of things are changing about our societies, among them secularisation and drops in childbirth rates, is a more conservative view.
For example, increasing female access to career development probably drops child birth rates. Is that in itself driven by secularisation? I don’t think directly. And indirectly, everything is related.
The corollary is, that opposition to birth control while ignoring all the other factors you mentioned plays a huge role here - to the detriment of those involved, I would argue.
And when they did not had contraception and when kids started to work fairly soon. Even without contraception, in war time, famine, etc, people tend to have less kids.
> The drive to have a child has nothing to do with economic stability and access to affordable housing, health care, food, schooling and the ability to have a good enough work/life balance that allows a parent to actually participate to the children’s education and development.
It doesn't though; its been the consistent finding for many decades that, in the developed world, better economic security and stronger public social support networks predict lower fertility.
Children are a (unreliable, though, so it takes several to have a good chance of success if they are used this way) private old-age & disability support system.
Young people today are vastly better off than young people were in 1950, when food insecurity was higher and things like Medicaid, the ACA, etc., didn’t exist. And birth rates are even lower in European countries with robust safety nets.
“Hedonistic godless culture” seems like a good candidate for the problem, or maybe BPA or phenols or something like that.
In 1950, the birth control was not all that much accessible and even illegal in plenty of places. Whole lot of women and men were in less of position to control when and how many kids they have.
Wages for men under the age of 25 peaked in 1958. Afterwards, the loss of good paying low-skill agricultural and industrial jobs lowered wages for the young. Wages went up on average but only because wages for skilled jobs went up dramatically after 1958. Strong labor unions helped with that.
1958 was the all time peak year for the ratio of average wage to average rent, people were paying just 22% of the average wage on the average rent. This was also the peak year of the Baby Boom, partly because the rents were so cheap and it was so very easy for an 18 year old male to graduate from high school, get married and get his own place.
In economic ways 1958 might have been the best year ever to be a young male, at least for whites.
My oldest brother was born in 1957. My parents didn’t have health insurance so my dad had to pay cash. The bill was $40. Health insurance was less important when hospital prices were so cheap.
Lower economic and social stability. Higher fertility rates.
I'm not sure if this is as another commenter points out due to "private old folks care" or due to the sheer survivability. Any species in dangerous environments has more offsprings than in less dangerous environments.
Making babies reminds me of the meth epidemic: When you have no economic or social stability, no jobs, no education, and consequently no hope, sex like drugs becomes an escape.
In many places it's inextricably linked to most of the local social activities. Want friends? Want your kids to join a baseball team? Join a church first.
Except birth rates are extremely low in some of the most prosperous places. My in laws in rural Oregon are having kids. My friends in NYC and DC are having few or none.
NYC and DC are some of the most expensive places in the world to live.
Moving to an apartment with an extra room to accommodate another family member is a big investment especially in NYC. In rural areas, housing prices are quite affordable.
Not really, in nothern Europe religion has never worked well but they are the only ones having children nowadays, especially compared to the south. Family support and strong parental leave are the main reasons.
Measuring the fertility rate for Poland is a bit tricky since a lot of their most industrious young people leave the country. It's interesting to note for example that Polish immigrants to the UK have a fertility rate of 2.48 .
> This has a huge impact because the birth rates for irreligious people are very low.
It seems irreligious people are slightly more rational about these things. Raising a kid is a huge undertaking, and a lot of work.
But a huge part of the problem with low fertility is religion. Western religions advocate for a fixed family structure: one man, one woman. Even most irreligious people still abide by that precept, we haven't been free from dogma for long enough. The end result is that the work of raising a kid falls into a family which is way too small and stretched, living alone and relatively isolated in a suburb. If a couple needs to commit 95% of their time together to their kid, it's going to be a hard sell for those two people. Grandparents can help, and they do, but the generational divide makes it so that most grown-ups don't want to live with their parents.
Have you ever been to Scandinavia? If not, maybe consider to visit it would proof you wrong. Secular educated societies always have a smaller birth rate, but not all of them are created equal. Family friendly, social societies with humanist values at heart are simply a better environment to have kids in than religious, family-hostile, anti-humanist and/or anti-social societies.
Maybe this is why some hardcore fundamentalists are against birth control? Because deep down they inherently recognize that given a free choice nobody would like to have kids in their dream world?
One cannot on the one hand claim to be for "family values" and on the other hand take every political decision that makes it harder to plan a family: social security, health care, liveable wages, state paid day-care centers, birth control — these are all things that increase the number of families being created, yet coincidentally they are all things a significant number of (american) christians hate.
> Raising children is a lot of work and a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive.
Sure it does. But, secular (and open-minded religious) worldviews are more adaptable to present circumstances, adapting high-investment-per-offspring low-cardinality reproductive strategy in a stable environment near comfortable carrying capacity; whereas blind tradition-bound approaches to religion and culture more generally continue to apply low-investment-per-offspring high-cardinality strategies adapted to either sparsely populated or highly-insecure environments when not in such environments.
It has nothing to do with religion. It just so happens that population is self regulated. If infant mortality is high and the world is more dangerous people have more children.
> Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we show that women who report that religion is “very important” in their everyday life have both higher fertility and higher intended fertility than those saying religion is “somewhat important” or “not important.” Factors such as unwanted fertility, age at childbearing, or degree of fertility postponement seem not to contribute to religiosity differentials in fertility. This answer prompts more fundamental questions: what is the nature of this greater “religiosity”? And why do the more religious want more children? We show that those saying religion is more important have more traditional gender and family attitudes and that these attitudinal differences account for a substantial part of the fertility differential. We speculate regarding other contributing causes.
> But there are plenty of other interesting nuggets in the latest survey two. One that caught my eye: the stark differences in fertility rates between members of various religious traditions, which I charted above.
The same thing that makes people religious (holding on to an old reality/world view) is totally in character with having more children for the exact same reason.
Also religious people are more likely to want to preserve the status quo at all costs, which includes obsolete family structures.
The fact is most people are becoming secular by the day and most people are having less children.
Sampling from the laggards means nothing.
God is already dead. It just takes a while to get rid of the body.
> One underrated reason for this is the decline in religion among the youth.
I don't think this is it. Religious opposition to family planning is something of an artifact of the counter reformation. You can also find news articles from the 19th century America complaining about low birthrates irt other ethnic classes.
It's a single observation, but I've noticed that a lot of behaviors and best practices that were originally propagated by religion are coming back into vogue in Millennials and Gen Zs through other venues. For instance, the financial independence movement is essentially a modern extension of Protestant thrift, and recent push to counter sexualization also has religious counterparts.
"a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive."
I think it might be a lack of education. People are still having children out of wedlock, without the resources to properly raise and care for their children. When scientists speak of needing population growth, I presume they mean responsible childbirth and rearing, and not just creating babies. Unfortunately people do not take proper care to insure that the children they are creating will be provided and cared for.
One of the most troubling things about the decline in population growth is that the most educated people, and in my experience the most "planning-oriented" people in that group, are the ones least likely to have kids. This means that the people most equipped to tackle long-term problems are supplying the fewest number of children with their genes and values into the population, which will cause our electoral politics to be increasingly dominated by the uneducated and the impulsive.
Only if we had better methods of allowing social mobility and selecting the best among us that wouldnt involve which family you came from. /s
On a more serious note I really believe that only the "poor hustlers" strata of society is not having kids, i.e couples that have good jobs but would be poor if any of them stopped working, so they have a dog for now and pretend they will have kids after they're 40.
If you go up on the ladder you probably don't have the same growth problem, take N=1 Ellon Musk with 7 kids as example.
Reminds me of how having real animals on Blade Runner was a privilege of the ultra rich :).
We cannot strive for a continuous growth of the population since the earth's resources are finite. Someday we will have to stop, or regress; it's just that every generation does not want to be the one with more retirements and pensions over the shoulders of the working class.
Alternatively, we may become an interstellar species and circumvent these problems for an entirely different set. I find it unfortunate that our milieu's become so thoroughly pessimistic as to the continued, unbounded prosperity of our race--I feel as though it engenders a sort of defeatism.
Space has at most cubed resources relative to time (we can only explore a sphere assuming non arbitrary FTL travel). Population growth is exponential.
Even with space as a resource the math doesn't work out.
You'd just keep the pyramid scheme running for a few hundred years with the 1% elite inhabiting earth, and the current cheap workforce of the third world inhabiting the astroid belt.
It's important to be realistic. We are not an interstellar species, we build infrastructure for cars and we can't even afford the maintenance bill on it.
Even in space we could not afford an exponential growth. You would want to pace yourself before you can afford to reach other stars, then other galaxies. Eventually there will be nowhere to run.
You do realise there are probably more habitable planets than there are human beings right now? You seem to have no concept of how big the universe is.
I'm not saying we are going to populate the entire universe at any point, but your statement here is just ridiculous.
>You do realise there are probably more habitable planets than there are human beings right now?
Which is neither here, nor there. Speed of light, and around thousands of required technologies missing, many of those huge leaps over what's available today, make their existance (assuming we even knew where they are) moot.
And even if they were known what? You'll carry 8-10 billion people there for trips taking 10s or 100s of years with light speed? Or we're talking about some "generation ship" with some handful of humanity selected for it?
And how would that help the rest?
We haven't send a man out of LEO for 50 years, might as well forget those "habitable planets".
> You do realise there are probably more habitable planets than there are human beings right now?
I don't realise that, for one. It certainly isn't part of the shared knowledge or common sense, so I don't think the way you have expressed yourself is fair.
I thought we had only discovered a relatively small number of planets, most of which were relatively large gas giant types, and that claims to large numbers were based on speculation. That knowledge could be very much out of date by now. What is the current state of knowledge?
What is the definition of a habitable planet? If it's just "an earth-size planet that is so close to a stable star", I don't think it's really fair to call that habitable. If there's no life on the planet already, it would be a great deal of effort to make it ready for human habitation, wouldn't it? There will be rock but no soil, so we need to start with simple life forms for a long time before we can get human food to grow. Is there any reason to suppose that a lifeless planet would have a breathable atmosphere? Or if the planet is Venusian or in a snowball phase, we probably couldn't do much on a useful timescale. Again, I don't actually know what the state of knowledge in that field is, so I'm betraying my ignorance rather than trying some kind of "gotcha".
If we only need one planet at a time, I guess it's okay. But if we're talking about exponential growth, then we will need an exponential number of planets. We will "use up" the second one much faster than the first, and the third much faster than the second, and we'll probably need the fifth when we're starting the fourth and so on. There will come a time when we either need to slow down, or the difference between some technical and practical definition of "habitable planet" becomes relevant.
Even with a constant entropy production rate there would be nowhere to run eventually. The Universe is a closed system.
So you would always want to be thermodynamically efficient, which appears to also produce lifelike behavior. "Any system built to have nonzero memory has to be predictive to operate at maximal energetic efficiency."
>Alternatively, we may become an interstellar species and circumvent these problems for an entirely different set.
Don't see it.
The "manned mission to Mars" merchants will sell the dream of that trip for decades to come (they have already backtracked. Which, even when eventually is done, it would be a crude, Apollo-style affair, for a handful of people and equipment, not some sci-fi travel destination.
Anything further, and the hurdles are so many (plus "small" things like the speed of light limit and so on), that the only realistic thing would be "generation ships" going to some unknown place that might or might not have a habitable planet.
And that of course is only feasible with major major leaps in technology which we don't seem to be making, including several "invent a whole new paradigm" style solutions.
Heck, the reality is we haven't even been able to send a manned mission outside of LEO for 49 years now. Heck, basic infrastructure like roads and schools is in ruins, and people imagine being able to fund space exploration. Rather, bet on more decline.
People want to leave Earth because "it's bounded", but at the same time think that our capacity for space travel/inventions/bearing manufacturing costs/etc is somehow "unbounded", or at least easily handles us being an interplanetary species.
There are quite a few reasons to be pessimistic about space travel to new worlds. Never say never, but astronomy is no job for the impatient. It certainly won't help with our more immediate problems.
Look at the other poor planets in our solar system and those beyond the solar system are solidly beyond our reach.
> We cannot strive for a continuous grow of the population since the earth's resources are finite.
True, but the US is in the enviable position where it has enough resources to support a substantially higher population. The US has the second highest amount of arable (cultivated land) in the world, second only to India. However, its population is only one quarter of India's.
I'm not arguing that the US should increase its population to that extent, and I'm not arguing that having 1.3B people living in a country the size of India is a good thing. However, the US could maintain population growth for significantly longer than other countries.
This will likely balance out, as losses from certain regions that will be adversely impacted by climate change (e.g., Florida) will be offset by gains in other states (e.g., Virginia). There will be some detrimental impact, see Quaye et al (2018) "Climate Change Impacts on Farmland Values in the Southeast United States" for where I'm pulling this information from, but it won't be completely devastating.
Again, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, and I'm only talking about cropland and not the impact of climate change on costal population centers (it will be devastating).
I don't think the current numbers factor in water requirements, which can and will throw around these numbers quite a bit. India's farm protests are sourced in water problems to a significant degree.
Contrary to the fear mongering media, in almost all countries in the world now population growth is declining, and world population will plateau or fall in the next 50-100 years.
You can see this on the world population growth graphs now.
If you look at it stricly statistically, Earth's population will plateau at around 10-11bn people. We can easily feed that many people, and it won't be massively more than now in terms of environmental impact.
Yes, we need to learn to be sustainable more, but the trends are good and I'm pretty sure we will find a way to sustainably live as 10bn people on Earth.
We will most likely run into huge societal problems from declining populations very soon, rather than from growing ones.
One example I saw: countries that were the main drivers of population growth, India and China, are seeing drops in fertility rates.
Wider afield, increasing access to education drops desired family size (I guess gives people other options for “growth” than literally having more children). And education levels in populous developing countries are rapidly increasing.
It's the ecological footprint of each person that's a concern. You can feed 10 billion people, but people don't want to just not starve. We already overshoot the resources Earth can regenerate in a given year in July, and that regeneration capacity and our ability to organize will fall apart faster and faster. Imagine if the rest of the Earth's population would be allowed to live like people in the United States.
Much worse famines happened in the past with smaller populations. We can easily feed this many people - perhaps if we didn't spend so much trying to outbomb other fellow humans?
11 people per minute is 5.7 million a year. That's less than 0.1% of the population.
The inefficiency losses from production to meal (about 1/3 waste) and the unequal global distribution of food are the important factors not our ability to sustainably produce enough.
Another problem is population growth in areas that lack the necessary environmental/climate properties to sustain themselves.
During almost 2 years of Covid 4.2 million people died (2m per year) and people are terrified across world, but I have a filling that mentioning 0.1% you are trying to say that 5.7 million death due starvation (roughly population of Ireland each year) is not much?
Yes, I know stats, about waste, and also how half of planet undernourished, and half of planet is obese. Yes, if this is perfect world we would not have global warming, inequality, wars, we would not have extinction of animal and plant species, destruction of ecosystem... wealth would be distributed more fairly and we would already live in multiple planets. So, we do not live in that world, we live in world where people turn head on the other side when see someone on the street ask them for just a bit of food ...
I'm arguing that bringing up that 0.1% of the population is starving isn't a relevant point in regard to how much population we can actually feed. It was an answer to your original comment.
Your answer is derailing the discussion to a moral debate about the worth of lifes.
I do not know do you understand that Stalin had same pattern of thinking?
By that logic why not having 40bn people, I mean there is plenty of calories, we do not have to all eat each day, every other day will do...
The entire conversation only has sense in context of life and quality of life of those people, along with all other beings in ecosystem, as idea of the entire article is benefit for having more people for the sake of economy.
There is technical level so what is maximum. Maximum amount of caries with minimum amount of calories needed to survive = 40bn.
There is other side if there is one involuntary death due to starvation, there is no point of growing bigger population, as it is shitty civilization anyway and it does not deserve to exist.
Even in pure technical level calculation does not work, as we need to include all issues and loses, we cannot auto-magically say things will solve themselves.
It is necessary to include waste, and continuation of the food waste, then global warming (droughts, floods, pollution), then loss of top soil, issue with nitrogen fixation, issue with energy production, collapsing of marine life, supply chain ...
- About 690 million people globally are undernourished.
- The proportion of undernourished people in the world has declined from 15 percent in 2000-2004 to 8.9 percent in 2019.
- The rate of stunting (children too short for their age as a result of chronic malnutrition) fell from 33 percent of children under age five in 2000 to 21.3 percent in 2019.6
I mean yes theoretically everything is easy, but somehow in practice just does not work, maybe it will some day in future... they say hope dies last ...
> The economy of the developed world for the last two centuries now has been built on demographic expansion
No, demographic expansion has been a side effect of technological development, which has also been the basis of the economy. That's been true not only in the two centuries and change since the first industrial revolution, but its also been true for the hundred centuries or so since the first agricultural revolution.
That's kind of been petering off recently, the most obvious conclusion being that it is because agricultural and industrial capacity is no longer the limit on population, so continued development isn't fueling further growth.
I think both are true. If no technological progress happens, but the productive workforce is 1% bigger each year, cet par you expect a 1% GDP growth - 1% more stuff being made etc.
But sure, we can move on from that. At one point, the strength of a nation was counted in coal and sulphuric acid output, and investing in factories was all the rage.
> demographic expansion has been a side effect of technological development
There was also a cultural side to it. Instead of being a linear relationships, it's more that technological development removed a population bottleneck and antiquated old family planning practices.
Population growth is iirc highest in agricultural areas that experience significant increases in health care access and overall life expectancy. Instead of having to have 6-8+ children to ensure that 1-2 male heirs live to adulthood, suddenly you're faced with the burden of having to care and feed for every single child until they become self sufficient. This eventually drives the birth rate down to an economically sustainable level.
my brother just had twins and he told me it was gonna be $1000/month for daycare once they are 1-2 years old. and thats just for daycare...if you want to know why people aren't having kids, its because they are too expensive.
I wish we stopped focusing so much on the overall economy growing every year and more on individuals having a "richer" quality of life. In the last few decades we've seen significant economic growth, yet people are living in smaller and smaller apartments, struggling with debt, living cities that are overpopulated and crowded, while economists try to assure us we're richer today, both from a GDP standpoint and a GDP per capita.
It certainly doesn't feel like we're richer to me. A world that's less crowded and where you can afford a nice house with a garden on a single income would IMO be better than having a couple more zeros in my bank balance. We wonder why births are so low in the West, but when you're living in a 1 bed apartment and have $50,000 of debt you're not exactly going to be keen to introduce more financial problems into your life by having a kid. We see this play out in the UK with the working-class having significantly more kids because for them in many cases it actually benefits them financially to do so.
Our priorities seem wrong as a society. We're looking at metrics to optimise business health instead of personal health. We're using immigration to prop on the population while not asking why people in the society feel they're unable to have children. I think when people criticise capitalism what they're really annoyed about is this. Why are our politicians so focused business health and not on ours? Why can't we afford to buy a nice home on a single income and have money left over to raise a family? I keep hearing how people want to live in apartments in the city, go into debt and uni and don't want kids, but what choice do we have? These days we literally need to go to uni and live in small apartments in a city where we have no friends or family just to get a good job. And if we're really lucky we might have enough money for a kid by the time we're 35.
The article seems to posit that immigration is the only way for American population to continue to grow, but I am not convinced population growth is desirable. My family comes from a place where population growth has exceeded resources. Instead of encouraging population growth, might it be wiser to reinvest in population efficiency and productivity?
Planet Money (NPR) ran a segment in 2018 related to Trumps promise of growing GDP by 3-5%+. They theorized 3 ways to do so with one being "...double our immigrant population over the next decade". Import people, they take jobs and spend money to grow GDP.
Another option was delay retirement by about 10 years or work to 73 to expand the labor force and continue keeping people employed past (or into more) peak earning years. More income = more spending = higher GDP. Or, force labor
participation to pull those out of the workforce in.
And the third option was to enable 2 side by side dot-com capital purchasing booms or develop a new technology (like desktop/personal computers) that enables spending capital and increasing worker productivity at 2x the rate during the dot-com boom.
Between those 3 options, immigration is a clear winner. We have the space though we need to invest in infrastructure/schools to build it out. The jobs are mostly there esp. after the last 4 years drove immigration, legal or not, way down. We trashed the Irish, Italians, Polish, Chinese, even put Japanese into internment camps about 70 years back before normalizing most of those groups into American Culture (at least in decent parts of the country).
A taco truck on every corner is just a new variation of the American Dream. Immigrant turned small business owner/employer making a buck off the entrenched population to buy (or build) a home with 2 car garage and a covered section for the truck itself, maybe an RV down the line. 100 year old research by Thomas on Polish immigrants shows it takes less than 3 generations for an immigrant family to follow local customs, language, and other norms. In 40-60 years we'll be a more robust, wealthier, stronger nation thanks to a taco truck on every corner.
Thomas has an odd career (and love life) but did develop a few neat theorems including how immigrants become part of the local culture over just a few short generations. His Thomas Theorem, "if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.", is not only profound but evergreen. How one interprets the situation will alter ones reaction like an oncologist always seeing cancer or a network admin always faulting DNS (usually correctly so). We have a sect of the US population that considers election meddling/fraud and more as real although experts, leaders, and many more note how insane those conspiracy theories are. But they are real in their consequences with immense division on topics as straightforward as vaccinations or the existence of the pandemic. It's kid of silly how even as technology advances, people stay pretty much the same. In large groups we're still just monkeys with quality tools.
People always forget the main advantage of immigrants: they're raised and trained by someone else, and you can select the ones that suit your country's needs while rejecting the rest. It's an incredible deal for desirable countries (and a catastrophe for whoever is footing the bill).
Tax billionaires out of existence, free college, free health care, limit investment in rental properties and do away with vast chunks of zoning laws. Stop forcing Americans to life all their life to pay off their debt and making children expensive luxuries that only the rich can afford.
(And I can already feel the aneurysm I just gave half the people on this forum)
Children are expensive luxuries. Why would you subsidize them when there are 7.4B people in the world, with population momentum on track to arrive at 10B near the end of the century?
Subsidized higher education, universal healthcare, and higher taxes on the wealthiest are still all fine ideas, ideas I fully support. But the world needs less people regardless of those policies. We overshot global carrying capacity, and you can't socialized economic system your way out of that.
Generally speaking, the highest birth rates aren't in the types of counties overrepresented on HN. Our best shot for reducing the global birth rate is improving education in developing nations (particularly women's education[0]), improving access to contraception, and reducing child mortality.
I agree socializing developed nations' economic systems isn't having a huge effect on the global population growth. Focusing on the real problem means investing in the health & development of those with the actual highest birthrates, not making U.S. colleges cheaper.
Birth rates are a component, but so is per capita environmental impact. Lower total fertility rates everywhere are welcome [1], but if one were to prioritize efforts, you'd focus on highest per capita environmental impact (whether that be CO2 emissions, consumption beyond replenishment rate of natural resources, etc).
I'll go so far as to say that empowering women through education and family planning access alone in some countries isn't enough; you might have to provide direct cash payments to assist in developing agency through career development or entrepreneurial efforts. Otherwise, from my research [2] [3], they're beholden to their partner's family wishes (which may not align with their own, and they may not have the safety or security to assert their will).
* older people people favor policy that benefits themselves by sacrificing their kids
* young people have been economically tapped out and have lost confidence in supporting a family, thus wont have children
* population declines across the developed world [1]
* "elites" see writing on the wall and rightly anticipate economic decline
* elites and owners of assets (who are typically older) advocate for more favorable policies for themselves (lower wealth taxes, lower inheritance tax, NIMBY-isms) while also advocating for more immigration to keep labor costs down and population growth up
* young people get squeezed (again) with the double whammy of stagnant wages and high housing costs
And thus the US is set up for an ugly political war between:
Productivity per non-farm worker has gone up steadily in the United States. [1] As we keep becoming more productive, the economy will continue to grow, even without any change in overall population.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadBecause at a point, we sure can't have prosperity with continuous population growth.
Population growth expands general demand and markets, and really sustains some industries (construction, for instance), but is not sustainable, indeed.
If population growth stalls or even if population shrinks then the overall economic output will do the same. But IMHO that is not important, what is important for people is the economic output per capita and as such I think it's possible for people's lives to continue to improve.
A few countries have caught themselves in a bubble, and my country in particular (Australia) does everything it can to make sure it doesn't pop. There are numerous government grants for home-buyers, every time we have a financial crisis it's the construction and banking industries that get all the grants and bailouts, and even during the various COVID lockdowns there have been schemes to prop up construction. Government and council platforms are almost always based around construction projects, rarely reform or social programs.
I get why, without these schemes, the house of cards would come falling down. But at some point endless construction will have to slow down, and we'll need to make a more sustainable relationship with construction and property.
In order for the pyramid to grow in size, the people at the top consonantly need more people at the bottom, consuming, to keep it growing.
If the economy was "rounder" and more directly beneficial to everyone, it would be less necessary to have more consumers / population growth.
It seems to have huge wealth inequality ?
It's extremely difficult. Progress is almost always related to new products and services. Imagine developing those under the constraint of no economic growth. "We can't grow economically, so we can't develop this new vaccine unless we close all the coffee shops in town."
> Because at a point, we sure can't have prosperity with continuous population growth.
That's a different thing. In theory, one can have economic growth without population growth, at least for a time and in certain range. The economists call it "productivity"[1]; it measures how big is the lever that each worker uses to produce. I guess that we could, with the current population of Earth, have sustained economic growth without population growth for centuries, just by equalizing-up productivity across all population sectors and countries.
With that said, even the current human population of Earth is quite a stress on the planet. In the best world, we would find more and better places to live, so that we can leave our planet be and have the freedom to have families as big or small as we like.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201...
Therefore some of the things that we've done in an effort to make the economy more innovative has probably made it more difficult for anyone to have children. In particular, allowing the better paying jobs to concentrate into a few dozen cities means that many people now face the painful choice, either they stay in their home region, where they would have support raising a family, or they move to one of those cities, where they can have a good paying career, but where they will lack support.
Outside of a few dozen affluent cities wages have been falling to such an extent that low paying jobs have had less and less attraction for poorer women. Women's participation in the labor force hit its peak in the late 1990s and has been in decline since 2000. Many families are simply working less and therefore contracting their standard of living. (Obviously, we need less money if we are willing to live with less. In particular, we've seen the re-emergence of multi-generational households, something that had largely disappeared during the affluent years of the early and mid 20th Century).
There have been many cultural changes that make it impossible for us to ever get back to anything like Baby Boom levels of children. For instance, the impact of high levels of divorce:
https://www.workingmother.com/single-moms-you-need-support-s...
There was also the backlash against government services, in all of the Western democracies after 1980 (give or take a few years depending on the country) which taught a whole generation of parents that a given program, offering crucial support, might suddenly be withdrawn, and that generation of parents taught their children to be wary of depending too much on any source of support which might suddenly disappear.
But it's worth considering, the world is over-populated, so in many ways it is terrific that people are having less children. Less children means that 100 years from now there will be less strain on the environment. We simply need to be willing to adjust to slower economic growth.
Population growth is influenced by other factors than reproduction, namely immigration. I don't think it makes much sense to consider the environnmental aspect of population growth on a national level.
As Hans Rosling pointed out, children are sort of migrating to poorer areas of the world where fertility rates are still high.
The fertility rates are dropping everywhere, specially in populous countries like India and China. So the trend is similar worldwide.
Population growth is also influenced by life expectancy and immigration/emmigration.
I can also assure you that population growth trends are NOT the same everywhere. The West is approaching a new equilibrium, but places like Africa are still seeing tons of growth. I really encourage everyone to look up Hans Rosling on youtube. His lectures are highly informative and easy to follow.
This has a huge impact because the birth rates for irreligious people are very low. The total fertility rate in the US for irreligious women is only 1.4 children per woman compared to 2.2 children per woman for religious women.
The fundamental issue here is incentives. Raising children is a lot of work and a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive.
No, no, it’s about this hedonistic godless culture that’s eating away at our “precious bodily fluids”.
Bah… never expected such a comment here
Almost all of those countries are also suffering from declining birth rates as secularism increases. Most have much lower birth rates than the US.
You could also look at the minimal long term fertility effects of pro birth legislation [1].
The material factors don't seem to be driving birth rates as much as many people seem to think.
1. https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-uncle-sam-boost-american-fert...
For example, increasing female access to career development probably drops child birth rates. Is that in itself driven by secularisation? I don’t think directly. And indirectly, everything is related.
It doesn't though; its been the consistent finding for many decades that, in the developed world, better economic security and stronger public social support networks predict lower fertility.
Children are a (unreliable, though, so it takes several to have a good chance of success if they are used this way) private old-age & disability support system.
The OP was actually arguing:
> The fundamental issue here is incentives. Raising children is a lot of work and a secular worldview doesn't really provide a strong incentive.
In other words, current youth is too busy with their avocados and lattes to think about breeding (“for the Fatherland” I guess, given the tone.)
Which is a laughable argument, as much as -although opposite in spirit - your own “I breed children so someone will change my diapers someday”.
But by all means, don’t bother having children. You’d make a terrible parent.
“Hedonistic godless culture” seems like a good candidate for the problem, or maybe BPA or phenols or something like that.
Also, USA had post WWII massive economic boom.
1958 was the all time peak year for the ratio of average wage to average rent, people were paying just 22% of the average wage on the average rent. This was also the peak year of the Baby Boom, partly because the rents were so cheap and it was so very easy for an 18 year old male to graduate from high school, get married and get his own place.
In economic ways 1958 might have been the best year ever to be a young male, at least for whites.
My oldest brother was born in 1957. My parents didn’t have health insurance so my dad had to pay cash. The bill was $40. Health insurance was less important when hospital prices were so cheap.
Honestly, why? The religion cures social problems, traditional family with one income and homeschooling are pretty prevalent on HN.
Lower economic and social stability. Higher fertility rates.
I'm not sure if this is as another commenter points out due to "private old folks care" or due to the sheer survivability. Any species in dangerous environments has more offsprings than in less dangerous environments.
As economic wellbeing and freedom increase, birth rates decline.
Well it has to provide some, it is a market for people's attention nowadays after all.
Our paychecks seem to grow much more slowly than our healthcare costs, housing prices, university tuition, etc.
Finances are a huge factor in whether or not people have children.
And speaking as someone who was raised evangelical, there's not much in that religion specifically encouraging people to have children.
Moving to an apartment with an extra room to accommodate another family member is a big investment especially in NYC. In rural areas, housing prices are quite affordable.
Thank God!
It seems irreligious people are slightly more rational about these things. Raising a kid is a huge undertaking, and a lot of work.
But a huge part of the problem with low fertility is religion. Western religions advocate for a fixed family structure: one man, one woman. Even most irreligious people still abide by that precept, we haven't been free from dogma for long enough. The end result is that the work of raising a kid falls into a family which is way too small and stretched, living alone and relatively isolated in a suburb. If a couple needs to commit 95% of their time together to their kid, it's going to be a hard sell for those two people. Grandparents can help, and they do, but the generational divide makes it so that most grown-ups don't want to live with their parents.
Maybe this is why some hardcore fundamentalists are against birth control? Because deep down they inherently recognize that given a free choice nobody would like to have kids in their dream world?
One cannot on the one hand claim to be for "family values" and on the other hand take every political decision that makes it harder to plan a family: social security, health care, liveable wages, state paid day-care centers, birth control — these are all things that increase the number of families being created, yet coincidentally they are all things a significant number of (american) christians hate.
Sure it does. But, secular (and open-minded religious) worldviews are more adaptable to present circumstances, adapting high-investment-per-offspring low-cardinality reproductive strategy in a stable environment near comfortable carrying capacity; whereas blind tradition-bound approaches to religion and culture more generally continue to apply low-investment-per-offspring high-cardinality strategies adapted to either sparsely populated or highly-insecure environments when not in such environments.
This is also true for almost any species.
> Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we show that women who report that religion is “very important” in their everyday life have both higher fertility and higher intended fertility than those saying religion is “somewhat important” or “not important.” Factors such as unwanted fertility, age at childbearing, or degree of fertility postponement seem not to contribute to religiosity differentials in fertility. This answer prompts more fundamental questions: what is the nature of this greater “religiosity”? And why do the more religious want more children? We show that those saying religion is more important have more traditional gender and family attitudes and that these attitudinal differences account for a substantial part of the fertility differential. We speculate regarding other contributing causes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/12/chart...
https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...
> But there are plenty of other interesting nuggets in the latest survey two. One that caught my eye: the stark differences in fertility rates between members of various religious traditions, which I charted above.
The same thing that makes people religious (holding on to an old reality/world view) is totally in character with having more children for the exact same reason. Also religious people are more likely to want to preserve the status quo at all costs, which includes obsolete family structures.
The fact is most people are becoming secular by the day and most people are having less children.
Sampling from the laggards means nothing.
God is already dead. It just takes a while to get rid of the body.
I don't think this is it. Religious opposition to family planning is something of an artifact of the counter reformation. You can also find news articles from the 19th century America complaining about low birthrates irt other ethnic classes.
It's a single observation, but I've noticed that a lot of behaviors and best practices that were originally propagated by religion are coming back into vogue in Millennials and Gen Zs through other venues. For instance, the financial independence movement is essentially a modern extension of Protestant thrift, and recent push to counter sexualization also has religious counterparts.
I think it might be a lack of education. People are still having children out of wedlock, without the resources to properly raise and care for their children. When scientists speak of needing population growth, I presume they mean responsible childbirth and rearing, and not just creating babies. Unfortunately people do not take proper care to insure that the children they are creating will be provided and cared for.
On a more serious note I really believe that only the "poor hustlers" strata of society is not having kids, i.e couples that have good jobs but would be poor if any of them stopped working, so they have a dog for now and pretend they will have kids after they're 40.
If you go up on the ladder you probably don't have the same growth problem, take N=1 Ellon Musk with 7 kids as example.
Reminds me of how having real animals on Blade Runner was a privilege of the ultra rich :).
It would be extremely difficult to establish this causation to some level that can be trusted.
The causation is likely; economic growth > jobs > families > births.
Even with space as a resource the math doesn't work out.
You'd just keep the pyramid scheme running for a few hundred years with the 1% elite inhabiting earth, and the current cheap workforce of the third world inhabiting the astroid belt.
Without sustainable politics/culture, the population will need endlessly to new locations. Space colonization would just postpone the need.
Even in space we could not afford an exponential growth. You would want to pace yourself before you can afford to reach other stars, then other galaxies. Eventually there will be nowhere to run.
You do realise there are probably more habitable planets than there are human beings right now? You seem to have no concept of how big the universe is.
I'm not saying we are going to populate the entire universe at any point, but your statement here is just ridiculous.
Which is neither here, nor there. Speed of light, and around thousands of required technologies missing, many of those huge leaps over what's available today, make their existance (assuming we even knew where they are) moot.
And even if they were known what? You'll carry 8-10 billion people there for trips taking 10s or 100s of years with light speed? Or we're talking about some "generation ship" with some handful of humanity selected for it?
And how would that help the rest?
We haven't send a man out of LEO for 50 years, might as well forget those "habitable planets".
I don't realise that, for one. It certainly isn't part of the shared knowledge or common sense, so I don't think the way you have expressed yourself is fair.
I thought we had only discovered a relatively small number of planets, most of which were relatively large gas giant types, and that claims to large numbers were based on speculation. That knowledge could be very much out of date by now. What is the current state of knowledge?
What is the definition of a habitable planet? If it's just "an earth-size planet that is so close to a stable star", I don't think it's really fair to call that habitable. If there's no life on the planet already, it would be a great deal of effort to make it ready for human habitation, wouldn't it? There will be rock but no soil, so we need to start with simple life forms for a long time before we can get human food to grow. Is there any reason to suppose that a lifeless planet would have a breathable atmosphere? Or if the planet is Venusian or in a snowball phase, we probably couldn't do much on a useful timescale. Again, I don't actually know what the state of knowledge in that field is, so I'm betraying my ignorance rather than trying some kind of "gotcha".
If we only need one planet at a time, I guess it's okay. But if we're talking about exponential growth, then we will need an exponential number of planets. We will "use up" the second one much faster than the first, and the third much faster than the second, and we'll probably need the fifth when we're starting the fourth and so on. There will come a time when we either need to slow down, or the difference between some technical and practical definition of "habitable planet" becomes relevant.
Even with a constant entropy production rate there would be nowhere to run eventually. The Universe is a closed system.
So you would always want to be thermodynamically efficient, which appears to also produce lifelike behavior. "Any system built to have nonzero memory has to be predictive to operate at maximal energetic efficiency."
https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3271
Even a tiny fraction of our galaxy is large enough that you can run your entire lifetime and then some. That is also part of the problem...
Don't see it.
The "manned mission to Mars" merchants will sell the dream of that trip for decades to come (they have already backtracked. Which, even when eventually is done, it would be a crude, Apollo-style affair, for a handful of people and equipment, not some sci-fi travel destination.
Anything further, and the hurdles are so many (plus "small" things like the speed of light limit and so on), that the only realistic thing would be "generation ships" going to some unknown place that might or might not have a habitable planet.
And that of course is only feasible with major major leaps in technology which we don't seem to be making, including several "invent a whole new paradigm" style solutions.
Heck, the reality is we haven't even been able to send a manned mission outside of LEO for 49 years now. Heck, basic infrastructure like roads and schools is in ruins, and people imagine being able to fund space exploration. Rather, bet on more decline.
People want to leave Earth because "it's bounded", but at the same time think that our capacity for space travel/inventions/bearing manufacturing costs/etc is somehow "unbounded", or at least easily handles us being an interplanetary species.
Look at the other poor planets in our solar system and those beyond the solar system are solidly beyond our reach.
True, but the US is in the enviable position where it has enough resources to support a substantially higher population. The US has the second highest amount of arable (cultivated land) in the world, second only to India. However, its population is only one quarter of India's.
I'm not arguing that the US should increase its population to that extent, and I'm not arguing that having 1.3B people living in a country the size of India is a good thing. However, the US could maintain population growth for significantly longer than other countries.
Again, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, and I'm only talking about cropland and not the impact of climate change on costal population centers (it will be devastating).
You can see this on the world population growth graphs now.
If you look at it stricly statistically, Earth's population will plateau at around 10-11bn people. We can easily feed that many people, and it won't be massively more than now in terms of environmental impact.
Yes, we need to learn to be sustainable more, but the trends are good and I'm pretty sure we will find a way to sustainably live as 10bn people on Earth.
We will most likely run into huge societal problems from declining populations very soon, rather than from growing ones.
Wider afield, increasing access to education drops desired family size (I guess gives people other options for “growth” than literally having more children). And education levels in populous developing countries are rapidly increasing.
It is interesting you said that especially as Oxfam recent study says that each minute 11 people dies of hunger while planet has 7.8bn people.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/oxfam-11-people-...
The inefficiency losses from production to meal (about 1/3 waste) and the unequal global distribution of food are the important factors not our ability to sustainably produce enough.
Another problem is population growth in areas that lack the necessary environmental/climate properties to sustain themselves.
Yes, I know stats, about waste, and also how half of planet undernourished, and half of planet is obese. Yes, if this is perfect world we would not have global warming, inequality, wars, we would not have extinction of animal and plant species, destruction of ecosystem... wealth would be distributed more fairly and we would already live in multiple planets. So, we do not live in that world, we live in world where people turn head on the other side when see someone on the street ask them for just a bit of food ...
Your answer is derailing the discussion to a moral debate about the worth of lifes.
By that logic why not having 40bn people, I mean there is plenty of calories, we do not have to all eat each day, every other day will do...
The entire conversation only has sense in context of life and quality of life of those people, along with all other beings in ecosystem, as idea of the entire article is benefit for having more people for the sake of economy.
There is technical level so what is maximum. Maximum amount of caries with minimum amount of calories needed to survive = 40bn. There is other side if there is one involuntary death due to starvation, there is no point of growing bigger population, as it is shitty civilization anyway and it does not deserve to exist.
Even in pure technical level calculation does not work, as we need to include all issues and loses, we cannot auto-magically say things will solve themselves.
It is necessary to include waste, and continuation of the food waste, then global warming (droughts, floods, pollution), then loss of top soil, issue with nitrogen fixation, issue with energy production, collapsing of marine life, supply chain ...
- The proportion of undernourished people in the world has declined from 15 percent in 2000-2004 to 8.9 percent in 2019.
- The rate of stunting (children too short for their age as a result of chronic malnutrition) fell from 33 percent of children under age five in 2000 to 21.3 percent in 2019.6
https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/world-hunger-facts-stati...
I mean yes theoretically everything is easy, but somehow in practice just does not work, maybe it will some day in future... they say hope dies last ...
You give humans too little credit.
There is no idea too stupid for humans to strive for and murder/subjugate each other over.
Have a look at any history book of any culture in any century for some ideas.
No, demographic expansion has been a side effect of technological development, which has also been the basis of the economy. That's been true not only in the two centuries and change since the first industrial revolution, but its also been true for the hundred centuries or so since the first agricultural revolution.
That's kind of been petering off recently, the most obvious conclusion being that it is because agricultural and industrial capacity is no longer the limit on population, so continued development isn't fueling further growth.
But sure, we can move on from that. At one point, the strength of a nation was counted in coal and sulphuric acid output, and investing in factories was all the rage.
There was also a cultural side to it. Instead of being a linear relationships, it's more that technological development removed a population bottleneck and antiquated old family planning practices.
Population growth is iirc highest in agricultural areas that experience significant increases in health care access and overall life expectancy. Instead of having to have 6-8+ children to ensure that 1-2 male heirs live to adulthood, suddenly you're faced with the burden of having to care and feed for every single child until they become self sufficient. This eventually drives the birth rate down to an economically sustainable level.
It certainly doesn't feel like we're richer to me. A world that's less crowded and where you can afford a nice house with a garden on a single income would IMO be better than having a couple more zeros in my bank balance. We wonder why births are so low in the West, but when you're living in a 1 bed apartment and have $50,000 of debt you're not exactly going to be keen to introduce more financial problems into your life by having a kid. We see this play out in the UK with the working-class having significantly more kids because for them in many cases it actually benefits them financially to do so.
Our priorities seem wrong as a society. We're looking at metrics to optimise business health instead of personal health. We're using immigration to prop on the population while not asking why people in the society feel they're unable to have children. I think when people criticise capitalism what they're really annoyed about is this. Why are our politicians so focused business health and not on ours? Why can't we afford to buy a nice home on a single income and have money left over to raise a family? I keep hearing how people want to live in apartments in the city, go into debt and uni and don't want kids, but what choice do we have? These days we literally need to go to uni and live in small apartments in a city where we have no friends or family just to get a good job. And if we're really lucky we might have enough money for a kid by the time we're 35.
Another option was delay retirement by about 10 years or work to 73 to expand the labor force and continue keeping people employed past (or into more) peak earning years. More income = more spending = higher GDP. Or, force labor participation to pull those out of the workforce in.
And the third option was to enable 2 side by side dot-com capital purchasing booms or develop a new technology (like desktop/personal computers) that enables spending capital and increasing worker productivity at 2x the rate during the dot-com boom.
Between those 3 options, immigration is a clear winner. We have the space though we need to invest in infrastructure/schools to build it out. The jobs are mostly there esp. after the last 4 years drove immigration, legal or not, way down. We trashed the Irish, Italians, Polish, Chinese, even put Japanese into internment camps about 70 years back before normalizing most of those groups into American Culture (at least in decent parts of the country).
A taco truck on every corner is just a new variation of the American Dream. Immigrant turned small business owner/employer making a buck off the entrenched population to buy (or build) a home with 2 car garage and a covered section for the truck itself, maybe an RV down the line. 100 year old research by Thomas on Polish immigrants shows it takes less than 3 generations for an immigrant family to follow local customs, language, and other norms. In 40-60 years we'll be a more robust, wealthier, stronger nation thanks to a taco truck on every corner.
Thomas has an odd career (and love life) but did develop a few neat theorems including how immigrants become part of the local culture over just a few short generations. His Thomas Theorem, "if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.", is not only profound but evergreen. How one interprets the situation will alter ones reaction like an oncologist always seeing cancer or a network admin always faulting DNS (usually correctly so). We have a sect of the US population that considers election meddling/fraud and more as real although experts, leaders, and many more note how insane those conspiracy theories are. But they are real in their consequences with immense division on topics as straightforward as vaccinations or the existence of the pandemic. It's kid of silly how even as technology advances, people stay pretty much the same. In large groups we're still just monkeys with quality tools.
Planet Money Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/531956234
Thomas and the Polish Peasant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polish_Peasant_in_Europe_a...
(And I can already feel the aneurysm I just gave half the people on this forum)
Subsidized higher education, universal healthcare, and higher taxes on the wealthiest are still all fine ideas, ideas I fully support. But the world needs less people regardless of those policies. We overshot global carrying capacity, and you can't socialized economic system your way out of that.
I agree socializing developed nations' economic systems isn't having a huge effect on the global population growth. Focusing on the real problem means investing in the health & development of those with the actual highest birthrates, not making U.S. colleges cheaper.
[0] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-educati...
I'll go so far as to say that empowering women through education and family planning access alone in some countries isn't enough; you might have to provide direct cash payments to assist in developing agency through career development or entrepreneurial efforts. Otherwise, from my research [2] [3], they're beholden to their partner's family wishes (which may not align with their own, and they may not have the safety or security to assert their will).
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/
[2] https://theconversation.com/family-size-why-some-nigerian-me... ("Family size: why some Nigerian men want more children")
[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/africa-s-populati... ("Men also have to relinquish sole control over the decision to have children and refrain from abusing wives or partners who seek birth control.")
Here's the gist:
* older people people favor policy that benefits themselves by sacrificing their kids
* young people have been economically tapped out and have lost confidence in supporting a family, thus wont have children
* population declines across the developed world [1]
* "elites" see writing on the wall and rightly anticipate economic decline
* elites and owners of assets (who are typically older) advocate for more favorable policies for themselves (lower wealth taxes, lower inheritance tax, NIMBY-isms) while also advocating for more immigration to keep labor costs down and population growth up
* young people get squeezed (again) with the double whammy of stagnant wages and high housing costs
And thus the US is set up for an ugly political war between:
* young vs old
* those who do not own assets vs asset owners
* anti-establishment vs establishment
* socialism vs capitalism
* closed borders vs open borders
* etc
Which is playing out as we speak.
[1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2019/
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB