I'm watching for these countrues to open up immigration. China will have more than enough internal migration to last for a very long time.
But Korea, via its new digital nomad and culture visas seems to be opening up. If current trends presist we're headed towards a future where people from high population growth countries end up immigrating.
I actually don't see this as a problem. The world is full of willing workers. They might just need a visa
Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all costs" immigration platform? It seems to be astroturfed alot.
Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family. Even better, incentivize families. Or is that too expensive for bankers?
> Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family. Even better, incentivize families. Or is that too expensive for bankers?
For that to happen, resources need to be reallocated from somewhere else towards this. For that to happen, people would need to express this via voting.
> Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all costs" immigration platform?
Those resources don't come out of nowhere, so there is a need for immigration as well to get work done.
"Those resources don't come out of nowhere, so there is a need for immigration as well to get work done."
Efficiency gains in a process certainly create extra "resources" whatever they might be. But I do applaud you for not saying "we need immigration because we need ethnic food" like most people say nowadays.
> Efficiency gains in a process certainly create extra "resources" whatever they might be.
Sure, and most of the world has much better lives already because of that then their parents.
This is excluding US which had a unique position after ww2 which has eroded to some extent but is still much better then the rest of the world..
> But I do applaud you for not saying "we need immigration because we need ethnic food" like most people say nowadays.
I would guess that is dismissive on purpose, people saying that are avoiding a potentially sensitive topic which they do not care to engage in. (which I probably should as well, so yes, ethnic food is the reason)
> Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all costs" immigration platform?
All else being equal, more GDP (per person) means more wealth per person. More housing space, more heating, more antibiotics and children's sledges. So yeah, I support more GDP.
> Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family
We've tried that; doesn't work. Not much at least. Sweden and France have had a bit of success, but not enough to even get back to sustainable fertility levels, let alone natural population growth.
Why would we want to do that? Low fertility is a solution for many of our other problems, related to ecological overshoot. It will be vastly easier to reduce energy consumption and pollution output (including of course CO2) in a world where the population is no longer rising.
Almost every person that has told me about the perils of overpopulation...more people, has also told me that its in my best interest have open borders e.g. more people. Why the hypocrisy in message? The unbelievable immigration in my country is causing a reduction in quality of living not unlike what I would expect with overpopulation because.... it is overpopulation.
The fertility only needs to be increased back to the level providing stable population size, it doesn't have to be ramped up to the level causing the population to grow again.
I see no reason we shouldn't stabilize the population at a size rather lower than the one we currently have. This is a problem our grandchildren can solve, if they want to.
The problem is our current economic system will not survive shrinking population. We know already that ever growing population is not sustainable, either. But the stable population size is still workable within the current system.
The scheme of there being a retirement age when you get older relies on there being a lot more young than old people. If, hypothetically, there were a 50/50 split between the retired and the working, the living standards of the working would decline and working aged people wouldn't themselves be able to retire at the same age as those before them. They'd probably resent the old retired people and the previous generations for both having no children and retiring, leaving them to deal with the worsening living conditions.
>> The scheme of there being a retirement age when you get older relies on there being a lot more young than old people
No it doesn't. Young people need to be taken care of also. If there are fewer young people needing infant care, daycare, then education, that frees up resources that can take care of old people instead of taking care of young people.
Today young people who go to college aren't productive for almost a quarter century. Average length of retirement is 18 years.
It is fundamentally strange to look at a society which stops having children to the extent that it will no longer exist within 2-4 generations as having a problem of "not enough workers."
Perhaps part of the problem is that we see individuals only as workers?
The focus on workers is a result of the fundamental problem of depopulation being economic. One family growing old without replacing themselves with a gaggle of grandchildren is one thing, but an entire country becoming predominantly retired is an economic disaster for those retirees. It's about maintaining economic growth so that old people can live off their investments, which requires the post-productive folk to be outnumbered by still-productive folk.
You know, I spent some time in college learning economics, and lots of time after that listening to podcasts about economics ("Planet Money" has long been great), but like almost every other belief I had when I was younger, I seem to have lost this one as well.
Supposedly we've had decades of productivity growth, so you'd think that it would be possible for a smaller cohort of workers to keep everything going, and yet it is apparently a creeping disaster that there may not be enough of them to maintain modern civilization in the not-so-distant future. Like many aspects of modern life, it just isn't really adding up to me.
It's funny how AI/automation discussions are dominated by a jobpocalypse but when the topic is demographics or (god forbid) putting down the retirement age suddenly it's a lack of workerpocalypse and "quick, find some immigrants!"
There is a glaring contradiction there that I think has more than a little to do with the way capital dictates the shape of modern political discourse.
I also think we are being subtly prepared not for a crisis of demography or a crisis of automation but instead a crisis of oligarchy.
People have lived much denser in apartments in cities for hundreds of years. Whole families used to live in a room on Paris a couple hundred years back. Was the fertility as low in those cities back then too? (This is a serious question I just don’t know.)
Increasing the standard of living actually lowers the fertility. Everywhere! Not only in the capitalistic societies. Even in the Soviet Union the fertility started to drop as the standard of living increased.
Could just be another confounding variable like education, general cultural change, etc. I mean if “increased standard of living” meant “everything stays the same but taking care of kids is now easier” I would expect an increase in fertility. Obviously we shouldn’t simplify too much, but I don’t think increased standard of living alone makes much sense as explanation. I think something else is probably driving it.
It depends not just on absolute level of ease but relative. Suppose having and raising a child takes some normalized 100 units of work and some basket of luxuries takes the same 100 units. Even if having a child drops to 50 units of work, if that same basket of luxuries drops to 25 units, you'll still see a decrease in fertility.
It was like this in American cities, too, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries [1]. Yet immigrants still had high fertility rates, although they were declining by then [2]. That second link is a paper that focuses on the Irish immigrant fertility rate.
Every suggested cause of low fertility has problematic exceptions.
Religiosity generally increases fertility, but countries like Poland have both high religiosity and low fertility.
Urbanisation generally decreases fertility, but Israel has a high population density and high fertility.
Economic growth tends to decrease fertility, but periods of recession also decrease it. Moreover, Western Europe has both more wealth & fertility than Eastern Europe.
Social programs like benefits & maternity leave intuitively make it easier to have children - but many European & Asian countries have these with less fertility than the US & Australia (for whom social support is generally lower).
Why is that problematic? Doesn't the fact that is has very exceptions make it a rule? This basically means there is a wide set of confouding factors at play...
> Even women of Jewish descent who identify as secular have a fertility rate of 2.2, much higher than in any other developed country.
Possible explanation: Secular people in a society with large numbers of highly religious people, some of the habits of the highly religious will rub off on them. Whereas, secular people in a more secular society, that is less likely to occur.
Also, “secular” is a broad spectrum ranging from hardcore atheist at one end to “I believe in a religion in theory but I ignore it in practice” at the other. People at the latter end of the spectrum are still open to being influenced by the religious, sometimes without even realising it
It’s a bit more nuanced than the examples you raise. It’s more a continuum than a binary attribute and there is large differences within national borders.
For example: Israel does have a high fertility, but it’s more to do with religiosity than urbanization. The Orthodox and Arabs are more fecund than secular Jews.
Most of the fertility in America is due to Bible Belt Americans (who also generally happen to be in rural areas) and newly arrived immigrants (who also tend to be religious) and less to do with social support programs.
> Israel does have a high fertility, but it’s more to do with religiosity than urbanization.
Women of Jewish descent who identify as secular in Israel still have a high fertility rate.
Religiosity works well statistically in the US but it really breaks down in Europe, where it’s hard to see any substantial correlation in the interstate data.
> Women of Jewish descent who identify as secular in Israel still have a high fertility rate.
Above average compared to Germany but still exceptionally low compared to most middle and lower income countries. However the Haredim would give Nigeria a run for its money.
> Religiosity works well statistically in the US but it really breaks down in Europe, where it’s hard to see any substantial correlation in the interstate data.
I think this is proving the point that there are many of the factors listed in the parent that matter and it’s a continuum.
> Religiosity generally increases fertility, but countries like Poland have both high religiosity and low fertility.
Religious traditions differ in how pro-fecund they are.
Israel’s high fertility: Haredi Jews view large families as a religious duty; religious Zionists view the state as spiritually significant, and children are necessary for its future
Poland: in practice, mainstream Catholicism doesn’t really encourage large families any more. Pope Francis even tells Catholics “not to breed like rabbits”. Even with the opposition to contraception, many Catholics just ignore that, and for those who take it seriously, there is always NFP. There are subgroups of Catholicism for which this is different - the trads, Opus Dei. But the vast majority of Polish Catholicism is mainstream conservative, not trad or Opus Dei
It isn’t really an exception if one understands it as needing high religiosity and pro-fecundity religious traditions. Poland has much more of the first than the second.
I find the idea of pro-fecundity traditions appealing as an explanation because it seems to also intuitively explain why more patriotic countries like France have a higher fertility rate than Germany.
But I fear it becomes a bit circular - can we really say our explanation for countries having a high fertility is merely their cultural/religious desire to have big families?
I think the right unit of analysis is culture not country. Every country has multiple cultures within it, and some of these cultures are larger than others.
Both the US and Israel have high fecundity countercultural religious minorities, such as ultra-Orthodox/Haredi/Hasidic Judaism. The difference is, that minority in the US is such a small percentage of the population, that even though they are growing exponentially, they are still a rounding error in the demographics of the country as a whole (it may be a very different story by the time the 22nd century comes around, but we won't live to see that); whereas, in Israel, they are over 13% of the population, and will likely be 16% by the end of this decade [0] – so their impact on national demographics is much more substantial.
In Asia, the transformation to a life where education takes 22 years and marriage only happens after 28 years is pretty new.
When so much of life is given to the pursuit of jobs, careers, mortgages, and the general rat race, there is little time left for dating, marriages, child birth, and raising kids.
Countries have declining numbers of people working in agriculture, and agriculture is becoming more mechanized.
When you are working a farm with manual labor, children are income producing assets. As society moves away from that, children are costly liabilities, at least until the parent reaches old age. And social insurance decreases the value of having children as insurance against poverty in old age.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadBut Korea, via its new digital nomad and culture visas seems to be opening up. If current trends presist we're headed towards a future where people from high population growth countries end up immigrating.
I actually don't see this as a problem. The world is full of willing workers. They might just need a visa
Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family. Even better, incentivize families. Or is that too expensive for bankers?
For that to happen, resources need to be reallocated from somewhere else towards this. For that to happen, people would need to express this via voting.
> Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all costs" immigration platform?
Those resources don't come out of nowhere, so there is a need for immigration as well to get work done.
Efficiency gains in a process certainly create extra "resources" whatever they might be. But I do applaud you for not saying "we need immigration because we need ethnic food" like most people say nowadays.
Sure, and most of the world has much better lives already because of that then their parents.
This is excluding US which had a unique position after ww2 which has eroded to some extent but is still much better then the rest of the world..
> But I do applaud you for not saying "we need immigration because we need ethnic food" like most people say nowadays.
I would guess that is dismissive on purpose, people saying that are avoiding a potentially sensitive topic which they do not care to engage in. (which I probably should as well, so yes, ethnic food is the reason)
All else being equal, more GDP (per person) means more wealth per person. More housing space, more heating, more antibiotics and children's sledges. So yeah, I support more GDP.
> Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family
We've tried that; doesn't work. Not much at least. Sweden and France have had a bit of success, but not enough to even get back to sustainable fertility levels, let alone natural population growth.
No it doesn't. Young people need to be taken care of also. If there are fewer young people needing infant care, daycare, then education, that frees up resources that can take care of old people instead of taking care of young people.
Today young people who go to college aren't productive for almost a quarter century. Average length of retirement is 18 years.
Perhaps part of the problem is that we see individuals only as workers?
Supposedly we've had decades of productivity growth, so you'd think that it would be possible for a smaller cohort of workers to keep everything going, and yet it is apparently a creeping disaster that there may not be enough of them to maintain modern civilization in the not-so-distant future. Like many aspects of modern life, it just isn't really adding up to me.
There is a glaring contradiction there that I think has more than a little to do with the way capital dictates the shape of modern political discourse.
I also think we are being subtly prepared not for a crisis of demography or a crisis of automation but instead a crisis of oligarchy.
It's a great thing less people are being pressured into starting families or having unplanned families.
Probably for china, also environmental destruction is coming soon to really ding fertility a few notches
[1]: https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/tenements
[2]: http://www.econ.yale.edu//growth_pdf/cdp848.pdf
Religiosity generally increases fertility, but countries like Poland have both high religiosity and low fertility.
Urbanisation generally decreases fertility, but Israel has a high population density and high fertility.
Economic growth tends to decrease fertility, but periods of recession also decrease it. Moreover, Western Europe has both more wealth & fertility than Eastern Europe.
Social programs like benefits & maternity leave intuitively make it easier to have children - but many European & Asian countries have these with less fertility than the US & Australia (for whom social support is generally lower).
Looking through the EU, it’s hard to see any relationship between access to contraception/abortion and fertility [1]
[1](fig 2) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
Vast amounts of money might be wasted by governments in Poland, Hungary & elsewhere on fertility boosting programs that likely won’t work.
And academically, our dataset of countries is relatively small to begin with, so it only takes a few exceptions to break any statistical confidence.
But exclusively with the highly religious population, no?
Christians & Muslims also high fertility in Israel.
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
Possible explanation: Secular people in a society with large numbers of highly religious people, some of the habits of the highly religious will rub off on them. Whereas, secular people in a more secular society, that is less likely to occur.
Also, “secular” is a broad spectrum ranging from hardcore atheist at one end to “I believe in a religion in theory but I ignore it in practice” at the other. People at the latter end of the spectrum are still open to being influenced by the religious, sometimes without even realising it
For example: Israel does have a high fertility, but it’s more to do with religiosity than urbanization. The Orthodox and Arabs are more fecund than secular Jews.
Most of the fertility in America is due to Bible Belt Americans (who also generally happen to be in rural areas) and newly arrived immigrants (who also tend to be religious) and less to do with social support programs.
Women of Jewish descent who identify as secular in Israel still have a high fertility rate.
Religiosity works well statistically in the US but it really breaks down in Europe, where it’s hard to see any substantial correlation in the interstate data.
Above average compared to Germany but still exceptionally low compared to most middle and lower income countries. However the Haredim would give Nigeria a run for its money.
> Religiosity works well statistically in the US but it really breaks down in Europe, where it’s hard to see any substantial correlation in the interstate data.
I think this is proving the point that there are many of the factors listed in the parent that matter and it’s a continuum.
Religious traditions differ in how pro-fecund they are.
Israel’s high fertility: Haredi Jews view large families as a religious duty; religious Zionists view the state as spiritually significant, and children are necessary for its future
Poland: in practice, mainstream Catholicism doesn’t really encourage large families any more. Pope Francis even tells Catholics “not to breed like rabbits”. Even with the opposition to contraception, many Catholics just ignore that, and for those who take it seriously, there is always NFP. There are subgroups of Catholicism for which this is different - the trads, Opus Dei. But the vast majority of Polish Catholicism is mainstream conservative, not trad or Opus Dei
It isn’t really an exception if one understands it as needing high religiosity and pro-fecundity religious traditions. Poland has much more of the first than the second.
But I fear it becomes a bit circular - can we really say our explanation for countries having a high fertility is merely their cultural/religious desire to have big families?
Both the US and Israel have high fecundity countercultural religious minorities, such as ultra-Orthodox/Haredi/Hasidic Judaism. The difference is, that minority in the US is such a small percentage of the population, that even though they are growing exponentially, they are still a rounding error in the demographics of the country as a whole (it may be a very different story by the time the 22nd century comes around, but we won't live to see that); whereas, in Israel, they are over 13% of the population, and will likely be 16% by the end of this decade [0] – so their impact on national demographics is much more substantial.
[0] https://en.idi.org.il/media/20567/annual-statistical-report-...
When so much of life is given to the pursuit of jobs, careers, mortgages, and the general rat race, there is little time left for dating, marriages, child birth, and raising kids.
When you are working a farm with manual labor, children are income producing assets. As society moves away from that, children are costly liabilities, at least until the parent reaches old age. And social insurance decreases the value of having children as insurance against poverty in old age.