Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
He came to the US Air Force Academy every year to give the incoming freshman class his lecture.
This was mandatory and went on for years.
I distinctly remember he sat in a folding chair next to an overhead projector and used what looked like 20 year old laminate slides (this was in the early 2000s) to go through his pitch.
Is he still doing that at other schools? He must be too old at this point.
The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
This is all well and good, but population dropping will only impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact.
Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping.
The much larger worry should be Climate Change, a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the population falling.
Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling resources.
EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big fear, the rich may have to start paying more.
The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.
Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.
From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part.
The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machines raise your kids will make it so you end up with kids that were raised by machines. Is that what you want? It seems like this is basically already a thing, with the varying amounts of screen time that parents will allow kids.
Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down.
> Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but...
> our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output.
Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated.
> We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this.
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system.
> Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder.
Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth?
> Affordable housing:
Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.
Little mention of automation in the labor discussion. Also, no real discussion of the consumerism aspect of the economy when talking about worker productivity.
Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.
The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand:
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
> each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes
I'm not familiar with the writer but their definition of "non-western" is a bit weird to me. I don't know what criteria were used or whether these are Denmark's classifications or the author's own.
The chart captioned "Violent crime conviction rates for immigrants in 2010–2021 by nation of origin expressed in multiples of the Danish conviction rate" says, for example, that Greece is Western but its neighbor North Macedonia is "other". Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania - all Western, but Czechoslovakia is "other". Croatia? Western, but curiously not Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, or Yugoslavia. There's no rhyme or reason here.
People originating from these debatably Western (or non-Western, I literally don't know but it's inconsistent either way) countries all have conviction rates above the Danish rate. Which would muddle the narrative of that particular chart a fair bit. Maybe it makes no difference to the fiscal question though.
The future is probably a society with more robots than humans.
We can see this happening now at Amazon.
Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis.
Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots.
Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.
How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway.
Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly living off their state pension.
As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree, too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7 more years to reproduce.
I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.
Hopefully the deflation scenario due to technology will help with this shift gracefully. Else, it will be extremely difficult.
But if we had deflation in the economy, how will the investment scenario will Peter out is anyone’s guess.
I wonder The people who invented this financial growth will, why they didn’t thought about this in the long term? I guess, I have asked a question which has quite a generic answer already…
I often meditate on this - can even the concept of index fund retirement survive an actual depopulation scenario?
Of course, older forms of retirement can still work (have ten kids each of who have ten kids and you command an army in retirement; perhaps they’ll even call you King) - but aside from that where does the growth come from when not from population or immigration?
The selection effects of this transition will be really fascinating to see after the fact. The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids", but is being subjected for the first time to "having more kids while extreme prosperity and modern telecommunications exist" which is a very different thing.
I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong.
The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M.
You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.)
Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging.
Then there are obvious economic measures, etc.
The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.
It's quite possible that China's population has also been significantly exaggerated. One thing that the China actually does quite well is universal childhood vaccination for certain diseases. Independent researchers looked at the number of vaccine doses ordered and found that it's way lower than the official government birth statistics would suggest.
Now this is an unproven "conspiracy theory" but it's entirely plausible that corrupt local officials have inflated population numbers in order to be able to embezzle more of the funds that flow in from the central government. A lot of people might exist only on paper, but it's impossible for outsiders to precisely quantify.
The arrogance of a comment like this is staggering. So you looked at some satellite photos and talked to ChatGPT and now you’re an expert on the demographics of a city? Crazy.
Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.
And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
Here is an uncomfortable truth: religious people produce more children, regardless of their income, social welfare status and living conditions. They are thought from birth that marriage, family and children are gifts from "God".
In fact, Christians make it a _requirement_ to be "open to life" (i.e have children) before they agree to marry you in Church (in addition to banning contraceptives, abortions and porn).
They also believe that pursuit of wealth, status and greed is a sin and one should focus his attention inward , towards "God", "Family", and "Charity".. disincentivizing people from dedicating their lives to their careers and missing their chances of having kids. is it no surprise then, that they ten to have larger families?
What I'm trying to highlight here, isn't a celebration of religious practices but the fact that we need a massive cultural shift, first and foremost to resolve this issue and if I'm being honest, I don't see this happening anytime soon.. at least not in our hyper capitalist society.
I'm not sure many people (especially women) are willing to sacrifice their lifestyles, career aspirations and goals to have children.
Unless people are taught from birth that having kids is their sole purpose in life and that family, motherhood and communities are deeply celebrated by society, they will opt out of having kids.
I’ve noticed that, besides the magnetism and drive for sex (which would be sufficient for a species to propagate), many people also experience the biological imperative (wanting their genes replicated) as its own separate feeling.
This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.
So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.
“the ruling classes chose to ignore its symptoms out of convenience until the problem became insurmountably difficult to solve”
Not only the elite, but all the voters who don’t care because the elite told them large populations were dangerous. I still meet so-called smart college educated people that think a large population crisis is coming.
This friend speaks my mind. Population decline is, on the whole, Good for humanity, in many, many ways. It's just bad for an economic system predicated on permanent growth, forever. That system was always doomed - if it weren't for demographic decline, it would just hit hard resource limits sooner. On the whole, I would much rather human population gradually decline through falling births, than precipitously crash through rising deaths.
Seems like an inevitable consequence of easy-to-use birth control will lead to an increase of the direct desire to have children, as those that don't have that desire get bred out of the pool. Of course, that may take many generations.
> it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers
Which is severely lacking in the most powerful nation on Earth
> It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic.
Again, never going to happen in the USA at least.
The current human model is work > all because we are a capitalist system, and we reward greed because it's the best economic system we put up so far. There will be powerful interests fighting this and pushing all the costs of this heavy system failure onto their workers and consumers etc. and that's the whole problem we are facing...
and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”
I feel like slide 39 would have gotten you chased out of polite society 10 years ago.
A lot of western countries economies are built on sustained mass migration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Arguably the United States where both parties champion it (turn the other check to illegal migraiton of the democrats VS mass H1B visas of the republicans).
Maybe expecting every single person to work and no one to homestead and care for the kids, within a system that explicitly does not support families, was a mistake. (Please note that I did not gender the roles. My best friend is a stay-at-home dad and he is amazing. They can afford to do this, though, because his wife's compensation is extremely high.)
I think it's gonna be fine. The capital per person (capital deepening) will be great. Things that prove hard to automate will suffer — maybe elder care can't be automated and will go to shit — but a lot of stuff can be automated.
51 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 77.2 ms ] threadThis was mandatory and went on for years.
I distinctly remember he sat in a folding chair next to an overhead projector and used what looked like 20 year old laminate slides (this was in the early 2000s) to go through his pitch.
Is he still doing that at other schools? He must be too old at this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Most never get held to account for their wrong predictions. But he seems a particularly egregious case.
Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping.
The much larger worry should be Climate Change, a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the population falling.
Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling resources.
EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big fear, the rich may have to start paying more.
I read that people were copulating in the streets of London the day of the Armistice.
Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.
From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part.
The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machines raise your kids will make it so you end up with kids that were raised by machines. Is that what you want? It seems like this is basically already a thing, with the varying amounts of screen time that parents will allow kids.
Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down.
> Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but...
> our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output.
Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated.
> We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this.
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system.
> Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder.
Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth?
> Affordable housing:
Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.
Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
I'm not familiar with the writer but their definition of "non-western" is a bit weird to me. I don't know what criteria were used or whether these are Denmark's classifications or the author's own.
The chart captioned "Violent crime conviction rates for immigrants in 2010–2021 by nation of origin expressed in multiples of the Danish conviction rate" says, for example, that Greece is Western but its neighbor North Macedonia is "other". Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania - all Western, but Czechoslovakia is "other". Croatia? Western, but curiously not Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, or Yugoslavia. There's no rhyme or reason here.
People originating from these debatably Western (or non-Western, I literally don't know but it's inconsistent either way) countries all have conviction rates above the Danish rate. Which would muddle the narrative of that particular chart a fair bit. Maybe it makes no difference to the fiscal question though.
We can see this happening now at Amazon. Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis. Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots. Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.
How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-o...
As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree, too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7 more years to reproduce.
I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.
In South Florida it's always been like that or more.
No imagination required :)
But if we had deflation in the economy, how will the investment scenario will Peter out is anyone’s guess.
I wonder The people who invented this financial growth will, why they didn’t thought about this in the long term? I guess, I have asked a question which has quite a generic answer already…
Of course, older forms of retirement can still work (have ten kids each of who have ten kids and you command an army in retirement; perhaps they’ll even call you King) - but aside from that where does the growth come from when not from population or immigration?
Recorded talk for the slides in this post.
The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M.
You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.)
Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging.
Then there are obvious economic measures, etc.
The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts...
Now this is an unproven "conspiracy theory" but it's entirely plausible that corrupt local officials have inflated population numbers in order to be able to embezzle more of the funds that flow in from the central government. A lot of people might exist only on paper, but it's impossible for outsiders to precisely quantify.
Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.
And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
In fact, Christians make it a _requirement_ to be "open to life" (i.e have children) before they agree to marry you in Church (in addition to banning contraceptives, abortions and porn).
They also believe that pursuit of wealth, status and greed is a sin and one should focus his attention inward , towards "God", "Family", and "Charity".. disincentivizing people from dedicating their lives to their careers and missing their chances of having kids. is it no surprise then, that they ten to have larger families?
What I'm trying to highlight here, isn't a celebration of religious practices but the fact that we need a massive cultural shift, first and foremost to resolve this issue and if I'm being honest, I don't see this happening anytime soon.. at least not in our hyper capitalist society.
I'm not sure many people (especially women) are willing to sacrifice their lifestyles, career aspirations and goals to have children.
Unless people are taught from birth that having kids is their sole purpose in life and that family, motherhood and communities are deeply celebrated by society, they will opt out of having kids.
This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.
So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.
Not only the elite, but all the voters who don’t care because the elite told them large populations were dangerous. I still meet so-called smart college educated people that think a large population crisis is coming.
Wired to orgasm, maybe. Wired to breed, no. According to all the data.
Humans are very analytical and do tons of cost benefit analysis before breeding, and apparently, choose not to in many cases.
Which is severely lacking in the most powerful nation on Earth
> It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic.
Again, never going to happen in the USA at least.
The current human model is work > all because we are a capitalist system, and we reward greed because it's the best economic system we put up so far. There will be powerful interests fighting this and pushing all the costs of this heavy system failure onto their workers and consumers etc. and that's the whole problem we are facing...
and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”
A lot of western countries economies are built on sustained mass migration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Arguably the United States where both parties champion it (turn the other check to illegal migraiton of the democrats VS mass H1B visas of the republicans).
As this study points out, it's not sustainable.
Raoul Pal primary thesis about macroeconomics is that Demographics is everything. Here is a 54 second video of him highlighting that issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJm_zFbIqPE
We must act IMMEDIATELY to secure london from this great tidal wave of horse manure.
Alternative, make it possible to have kids without heavy burden on the woman body.
Alternative, make it possible to become pregnant at 50-60 years.
This is all research vectors that we should work on, and not doom on hypothetical what ifs in the future!