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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

The broader issue is that the US birth rate is 1.77 births per woman -- and falling, which is below the replacement rate. If you want to maintain the population (and economic activity) at the same level as today, you're going to have to bring in 0.23 people per woman per generation via immigration. In the pathological case of closed borders, the economy will shrink in accordance with the birth rate.

This effect is on top of the non-zero-sum impact of qualified migrants.

Consider the 1.43 births per woman (and low net migration rate) of Japan and the fact that the GDP was lower last year than it was almost twenty years ago. In the same time period the US GDP has tripled. Canada's has almost quadrupled -- and Canada brings in 1% of the nations population each year via immigration, in part to offset its 1.5 births per woman.

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Why is continuous growth even a goal? There's a physical reality that at some point it must stop. We should plan for that. GDP growth is just a number. We should focus on quality of life.

(Notwithstanding transitionary points like "but this other country is still growing and will displace things," and "but who will take care of those decaying cities," etc)

Human wants are unlimited. GDP growth (in the ideal sense, when perfectly measured) means more wants are being satisifed. It doesn't imply growth in resource usage: if your CPU becomes twice as efficient, or your package delivery route is optimised, or your barber learns to cut hair faster, that all counts as GDP growth.

> It doesn't imply growth in resource usage: if your CPU becomes twice as efficient, or your package delivery route is optimised, or your barber learns to cut hair faster, that all counts as GDP growth.

If demand is not saturating your efficiency improvement then you are maybe capturing a bigger piece of the pie but the pie may shrink or grow. Isn't the pie the proper measure? Why are we measuring scoops of pie passing back and forth?

It only does if there are more packages that can be sent or hair that can be cut. With a shrinking population, both are untrue.

I don't know where your "human wants are unlimited" comes from and is a pretty big statement to make to not back it up with evidence.

However even if we except your premise that an increased GDP will help to fulfill this is highly doubtful. A increased GDP can (and does) very well decrease quality of life. Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.

In fact one of the reasons why the US has been so successful at increasing GDP is that the population has an increasingly unhealthy livestyle.

>I don't know where your "human wants are unlimited" comes from and is a pretty big statement to make to not back it up with evidence.

For evidence, look at the average savings rate in developed countries. It wants were limited, it would be higher. It's also the case that savings rate doesn't increase as income increase (in fact the inverse is often true; compare savings rates in poorer China and Indian to the US).

Clearly humans want things; this is the default case. To show this stops at some stage should require evidence.

>Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.

Driving, cheap energy, tasty food and divorce clearly satisfy human wants.

> >I don't know where your "human wants are unlimited" comes from and is a pretty big statement to make to not back it up with evidence.

> For evidence, look at the average savings rate in developed countries. It wants were limited, it would be higher. It's also the case that savings rate doesn't increase as income increase (in fact the inverse is often true; compare savings rates in poorer China and Indian to the US).

That's a giant leap, to get from savings rates decrease in some countries to human wants are unlimited. Moreover, savings rates are quite country dependent (e.g. Germany has very high rates). Might it be that people in the US have been led to believe that they can make up for their unhappyness by buying more things?

> Clearly humans want things; this is the default case. To show this stops at some stage should require evidence.

I can easily think of many people who are quite happy without having more things. So I just falsified your claim. Moreover there is significant research showing that having more things beyond some point does not increase happiness.

> >Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.

> Driving, cheap energy, tasty food and divorce clearly satisfy human wants.

"Unlimited" is a difficult claim to justify, but as evidence that human wants are in vast supply you might look at the way that Buddhism and Hinduism portray the bulk of human society as trapped in an endless cycle of wanting the next thing. It's not impossible to escape, but expecting it to happen en masse might be a stretch.

I think a more fruitful direction would be to distinguish between empty dopamine, and the kind of want that you can look back on and feel like it was aligned with your broader interests.

>That's a giant leap, to get from savings rates decrease in some countries to human wants are unlimited.

If human wants were limited, we'd expect to see, for any given country, savings rates increasing as incomes increase. We have not seen this, and in fact have seen the opposite (even in America, savings rates now are less than 50 years ago, when Americans were much poorer).

>Moreover, savings rates are quite country dependent (e.g. Germany has very high rates). Might it be that people in the US have been led to believe that they can make up for their unhappyness by buying more things?

Someone could just as easily suggest that German savings rates are too high because Germans are too fearful about the future so they save more. There's no objectively correct savings rate, so we can't say one country's rate is better than the other's.

>I can easily think of many people who are quite happy without having more things. So I just falsified your claim.

My claim is that "human wants" are unlimited, which does not imply that every human's wants are unlimited. If some people have limited wants, and some don't, we'd still expect the sum of human wants to keep increasing. And savings rates suggest that the majority of people don't have limited wants (or at least have not fulfilled those wants).

>Moreover there is significant research showing that having more things beyond some point does not increase happiness.

We're talking about wants here, not happiness. Who are we to say that somebody can't have what they want just because there's a chance it will make them unhappy?

> I don't know where your "human wants are unlimited" comes from and is a pretty big statement to make to not back it up with evidence.

I don't want to be dismissive, but this is basically page 1 of any Econ 101 book ;-)

As much as we make fun of economists, it's basically the only thing almost every economist out there will agree on.

Growth for growth's sake sounds like cancer to me.

Sure, some examples of GDP growth are win-win, like the ones you've listed. But those improvements--when discovered--will happen whether or not people have growth as a goal. They're good ideas independently.

But making growth a goal on its own is a good way to wind up with more toll roads, more complexity that requires an industry to help citizens navigate it (e.g. realters, tax preparers), more cases where the consumer's decision making is tampered with (e.g. advertising, the sale of addictive things), and the creation of problems just so there will be a market for solutions thereto (e.g. Hallmark).

These are all cases of GDP growth that I think most of us can agree we'd be better off without.

>But those improvements--when discovered--will happen whether or not people have growth as a goal. They're good ideas independently.

The point is that measures that limit GDP will generally also limit the rate at which these things occur. An idea by itself is rarely enough: it needs capital to execute. Things that limit the growth of GDP limit the growth of a nation's capital.

> or your barber learns to cut hair faster, that all counts as GDP growth.

Only if people get their hair cut more as a result. If haircuts take less time, become cheaper and people get their hair cut just as often surely GDP would go down. Same for package delivery.

GDP is a proxy for quality of life. Reason that continuous economic growth is a goal is that the economy has a number of feedback loops it in. If the economy is growing, people are more likely to consume, more people consuming results in more economic growth.

If the reverse is happening, the economy is contracting, this results in people spending less, which results in the economy contracting more, which results in people loosing jobs, those people have less money to spend etc.

Zero economic growth is unstable the slightest bit of noise will cause it to shift into a contraction. So having economic growth and using the limits to the rate of growth to control how much growth happens is much more stable.

Shouldn't we be looking then at GDP per capita? If there's less people, we can still be producing enough so that producers have jobs and get money and want to consume and &c.

I think that one of the issues with this GDP going down, which might not be the same in the US as in the EU, is the redistributive nature of the economy in Europe. Many (most?) social programs are paid for by people currently working and they're paid right away. In other words, you pay for your grandparents' pension, you pay for your neighbour's hospital bill, etc.

A falling GDP due to low fertility often comes with an ageing of the population. Older people usually don't work, usually need more healthcare, etc. Hence there's a growing need of money to redistribute, but less money coming in since there are less young people working.

> A falling GDP due to low fertility often comes with an ageing of the population. Older people usually don't work, usually need more healthcare, etc. Hence there's a growing need of money to redistribute, but less money coming in since there are less young people working.

That's accurate. The main "issue" here is that people live longer, ergo their retirement period is longer. When retirement systems were set up, with the retirement age set to ~65, people lived to be 70. Now they live to be 80, and the retirement age is still at 65.

On the other side: "back in the day", a lot of jobs where quite physical, which made it hard to do them in your 60ies. That's very different today. And of course: productivity gains more than make up for low fertility, we no longer need 30% of the population to work in food production, thanks to automation and modern technology, 1-3% can do the same just fine.

You're not wrong but GDP (just like other metrics) are liable to being gamed and over optimized.

I am sure plenty of people across America and western Europe would tell you their quality of life has gone down in the last 30-40 years (as wages have stagnated) and national inequality has increased in these countries.

I personally believe immigration and globalisation more widely are contributing factors to a wealth redistribution of the middle and working classes of wealthy countries to developing ones.

It's perfectly possible for global inequality to come down while globally local inequality increases. That would be a perfect example of Simpsons paradox - if wealth stratifies in every country you might see this.

That we can't have a nuanced discussion about that without it being shamed as nationalism or racism is dangerous. After all, governments are democratically elected to serve their own people. If they aren't looking after their own citizen's interests are they doing their job? More cynically if you structurally ignore the "proles" then you leave yourself exposed to populism rearing its head.

I don't really have any answers, nor much expertise on these matters but I notice a resoluteness on topics such as GDP which resembles faith more than reason.

"Why is continuous growth even a goal?"

In a pyramid scheme, it is required.

In a "greater fool" scheme, it is required.

In a political campaign, it is required because it provides a justification for lowering taxes.

As long as productivity grows faster than population, there's effectively no end to how much population can grow. You might argue that productivity gains will stop at some point, but then you need to provide arguments for that, not take as a given that there is a limit.

People's preferences for family size in a developed world seems to be providing a much more tangible limit to population growth than resources. People simply don't want to have as many children as it takes to substantially grow population when they're rich enough.

> You might argue that productivity gains will stop at some point, but then you need to provide arguments for that, not take as a given that there is a limit.

I have one. Productivity gains are mostly granted by energy (AKA bigger machines). W/capita is imo a better approximation to a nation wealth than GPD/capita in socialist countries, but even in the us you can see the strong correlation.

80% of this energy come from fossil fuel, coal and gaz make 60% of world electricity (probably more), and oil for movement. This is the limit to growth.

https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/eu-oil-depletion-2030... based on Rystad Energy study if you want to check the numbers.

> There's a physical reality that at some point it must stop.

There's plenty of room at the bottom, the sky's the limit, etc, etc. Technological improvement is the main (arguably only) long-term driver of growth and there's every indication that we're nowhere near done tapping what's available. Energy consumption per capita in the United States has been trending down for decades now. The "infinite grown in a finite world" criticism of economic growth may have merit thousands of years from now, but it certainly has no merit today.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locat...

I think his point is that the focus should be on intensive growth (use the existing people better, make their lives better) over extensive growth (have more people).

Though, OP, there are geopolitical issues with this, as Australia was extremely close to discovering in 1941. That's why Australia opened its immigration policy.

I mostly meant in terms of population. There is a physical limit to the number of people who can be on earth. If economic growth is dependent on population growth as many seem to be suggesting, then we need to reckon with that. And we should do it sooner rather than later.

More people means more technological development, which is then rapidly disseminated in the modern world. World population is estimated to peak sometime this century and trend downward from there. Combine that with the fact that eventually most other countries will have comparable standards of living and the free unlimited immigrants gravy train will end, but while it's available, immigration is great policy.

> Why is continuous growth even a goal?

Because there are more people who'd like their children to live a better life than them; than who'd like the opposite.

And while some of that will be intangible things like good friends and a feeling of community, some of it will be things like education, dental services, high speed internet, and working fewer hours - things that cost money.

A politician who can promise growth can promise a better life for rich and poor alike. That's a much easier message to sell than a zero-sum policy.

Hence why they claim we should focus on quality of life. It's pointless to artificially increase population to increase the GDP if the population rises faster than the GDP.

This is a really terrible line of reasoning to pursue, because it's basically the continuation of colonialism - the need to have a caste of second-class noncitizens doing a large part of the work; while also telling the "race replacement" fascists that they are absolutely correct and they are being deliberately replaced for someone else's economic gain.

> the GDP [of Japan] was lower last year than it was almost twenty years ago

That is an extraordinary claim that's contradicted by brief searching: https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-constant-prices

> This is a really terrible line of reasoning to pursue, because it's basically the continuation of colonialism - the need to have a caste of second-class noncitizens doing a large part of the work

Nobody said 'caste, second class or non-citizens' though. Yes, people who have the 'colonialist mentality' might assume that foreign-born people are only capable of replacing menial workers, but that's not implied by the basic logic that if people are born below the population replacement rate some countries and above it in others, some population transfer might be desirable and not consistent with much of the reality of immigration.

Unless and until deportation is eliminiated entirely, that's an inevitable part of being an immigrant. Regardless of the skill level and social status of your job. Even if you're a CEO you can still theoretically be deported for a driving offence in a lot of places, until you get your full permanent residence. And then you have to wonder whether a future government might remove that residence.

The British government has gone backwards on this: a British-born child of non-British parents was stripped of her citizenship, barred from the country, and denied legal appeal. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c347vzp58nzt/shamima-begum...

Aggressive stances towards deportation are the consequence of inaccurate arguments that immigrants are on average unwelcome freeloaders and destroyers of job value rather than making the future of the country more sustainable though. It's entirely possible for immigrants to have security of tenure and actually more desirable given declining birth rates: it's the assumption that our current society would be more sustainable in their absence which drives governments to make it as difficult as possible to obtain/retain.

All the rhetoric which drove repatriation of the Windrush migrants [a much more representative case than Begum leaving the UK to join ISIS] was based around the popularisation of the idea that the UK was 'full' of 'unsustainable' numbers of migrants. So it certainly doesn't help immigrants to pointedly refuse to state reasons why this is incorrect.

She went to join ISIS. I'm quite torn, morally, about the whole thing. It's not as black and white as you present it.

If maintaining the population size is the goal, then an alternative is to make havimg kids more attractive. Free daycare, education, healthcare, etc would go some way, but income stability also needs to be addressed. Even in Europe, the decision to delay kids is primarily economic (after 20 years of net zero growth).

Btw I still want open migration for all the other reasons.

I guess my question would be, why try and incentivize people who don't want to, to have children, when you can bring in willing fully-formed adults?

Because it is a dangerous fallacy to presume that all peoples are simply replaceable. When you import people you import culture, and that potentially leads to friction.

Because it's not always the case that people don't want to have children but they are instead constrained by their situations, which can be alleviated by free daycare, education, healthcare, etc.

I think what you are doing is assuming that the current state of the system is all it can be and that people's decisions they make resulting from the current system what they truly want.

At some point I question why people want to have children if their idea of "raising a child" is shipping them off as early as possible to have someone else raise them. Sure, situations vary, but it feel like these sorts of incentives eventually encourage parents not to parent.

Example of some incentives where I live:

- Pregnant women can start working 6 hours a day at full pay from week 12.

- Up to two years of paternity leave at ~80% pay, capped at roughly 3x the median wage. Either parent can take this, or it can be split.

- 3 weeks of paternity leave after giving birth for the father.

This means a couple can muddle through the first two years of a child's live without worrying about paying for day care of having to quit jobs.

Note that this incentives are country-wide and available for all citizens. The government pays you indirectly while you are in paternity leave.

How does this encourage not parenting?

Broadly that falls under the category of "development" and will have the opposite effect, lowering birth rates, and that's fine. Finland has all of that and more -- in addition to high wages and low inequality. They'll even mail you a box of supplies when you have a child. They have a birth rate of 1.48 vs Canada's 1.5 vs US 1.77

Yes, we should have those things.

No, they won't increase birth rates, they'll probably drive them down. I know it's counterintuitive, but they data is very clear.

Don't want to have children or having children has become a much larger economic burden?

I want to understand your argument better - are you arguing in favour of replacement of population for the economic benefits (of who?)?

So why would I - a person living in a country with my own culture surrounded by my own people - want to have adults from another culture with their own sets of values and morals over children from my own people?

My not so cynical view of the argument would lead me to suggest that "immigration" is an easy and short-term solution to the fertility problem. It's kinda hard to have politicians look at "generational" solutions to problems as the very nature of having politicians is that they "tweak and turn" random knobs to "fix" stuff that we ask them to. The rest is up to us as people and that is why cultural solutions mustn't be discounted entirely and political ones need to support that rather than being full-blown replacements.

Why instead of raising the birth rate, must we bring massive amounts of immigrants each year? For the short time Hungary's loan assistance to families with children has been put in place, it has already had great effects.

The question applies equally the other way round: why, instead of an race-obsessed government determining that having children is a 'public matter, not a private one' and chastising women for having the temerity to prioritise other things, do we not simply permit people willing and able to do the work into the country?

Irrespective of the merits or lack thereof of paying bonuses for having three or more children, fertility rate in Hungary is still well below replacement rate, and well below the US birth rate for that matter.

That depends on the reasons behind why the birth rate is below the replacement rate. If it's because potential parents feel financial or other insecurity that causes them to not have children, or have fewer than they want, then sure, that's an actual problem that needs to be addressed.

But if the reason is that people just don't feel like having 2 or more children, well, that should be up to them, no?

> The broader issue is that the US birth rate is 1.77 births per woman -- and falling, which is below the replacement rate

That's the “Total” (e.g., projected hypothetical lifetime) fertility rate; completed fertility rate (measured by women age 40-44, so it's a tiny bit low since some, and an increasing number, of women actually have children past that age) is actually up above the replacement from a low of 1.86 in 2006. TFR is only useful as a tool to project the future CFR, but it has a pretty variable history in actually doing that, and there are reasons to suspect it currently may be underestimating what it will end up being for women currently in their childbearing years for the same (but inverted) reason it overestimated it during the baby boom.

>The broader issue is that the US birth rate is 1.77 births per woman -- and falling, which is below the replacement rate.

Have you considered that the causation may be in the reverse?

The article pokes fun at skeptics of women in the workforce in the 60's and 70's. Yet real wages have remained stagnant since then, and given that divorce rates are significantly higher when the woman is the higher earner, it's not insane to suggest that falling (who am I kidding, fallen) family formation rates are due to those couples now having trouble forming in the first place.

Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap is required reading here.

Not even American but just consider the following. Rising wages (basic supply and demand) lead to an increase in the fertility rate as people feel more financially secure to have children.

And before you say that it will go to remote work: big tech has been dying and trying to outsource everything as it is still cheaper than legal immigration. There might be bigger incentives if wages do rise, but they have pretty much been there all the time

> Rising wages (basic supply and demand) lead to an increase in the fertility rate as people feel more financially secure to have children.

That's actually the opposite of what happens. As a country develops, wages go up and fertility goes down. Check out this chart of GDP per capita vs fertility rates. [2] It's a well known and extremely strong effect.

Fun and very poignant quote: In a 1974 UN population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated this trend by stating "Development is the best contraceptive." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility#/media/Fi...

Control-F “Economics matters for birth rates” for various citations backing a thesis that increasing wealth correlates with higher birth rates.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-chil...

This is an extremely well studied and well documented effect. One-off extreme situations such as WWII and COVID aren't counter-examples of a global trend. Development leads to a reduction in fertility. The only dispute globally is what happens once incomes rise after the birth rate falls below replenishment (i.e. whether there's a J-curve effect).

I read your article, and nothing there tracks the correlation between birth rates and income in a greater-than-replenishment situation. I conceded that in the tail end, rising wages may lead to more births, but I have not seen (including in your citations) an indication it would lead to an above-replenishment birth rate. Just some micro-level changes.

The citations are recent and pre COVID (2013, 2014, 2018, 2019).

I agree that educated, empowered women delay having children and have less children overall. Yet, the data shows income plays a part as well. Economic insecurity acts as an arrestor on the fertility rate (rightfully so), and economic security increases the fertility rate.

that fertility rates correlate inversely is, strictly speaking, true, but many confounding factors mean that a causal relationship is harder to pin down.

for instance, wealth disparity creates economic vortexes that suck people (women particularly) into unproductive economic outputs, like finance rather than childcare, not to mention a comfortable home life is increasingly out of reach for relatively more and more people. increasing corruption and general unfairness lead people to lose faith and opt out of productive life altogether.

gdp is certainly gamed as well, and leaves out some very important productivity measures, again, like childcare and homemaking, because these are historically seen as "free".

> for instance, wealth disparity creates economic vortexes that suck people (women particularly) into unproductive economic outputs, like finance rather than childcare, not to mention a comfortable home life is increasingly out of reach for relatively more and more people. increasing corruption and general unfairness lead people to lose faith and opt out of productive life altogether.

In some places, sure, but certainly not in all, and the correlation holds everywhere. For instance, New Zealand's birth rate is 1.8, and is the worlds's least corrupt country on the perception of corruption index, a much lower GINI coefficient than the US, and much better childcare, mat/pat leave policies and so on. Finland is another example, with a birth rate of 1.49

that's why i included the bit about the skew built into the gdp itself, but the larger point is that the correlation is so macro-broad that it's loaded with all sorts of confounding factors.

if we want both high (and growing) gdp and fertility over replacement, we need more economic fairness, particularly around wealth and income, which has all sorts of unintuitive distorting effects. that requires capital to be loosed from captive greed and spread more broadly and deeply into the economy.

immigration in place of high reproduction is fine too for growth, which is one of the points of the article.

you can't get prosperity and choke off sources of activity and innovation, which is what the US (and similar) is doing. those in power, along with the lower classes clinging to the scraps of privilege trickled down to them, want neither economic fairness nor immigration because it potentially dilutes their power and influence, others be damned.

they'd rather have most of a smaller pie (the current situation) than a proportionally-smaller but absolutely-bigger piece of a bigger pie (the zero-sum thinking). that's the conundrum in a nutshell.

You've been provided data that wealthy, equal societies have low birth rates, yet still you hold on to not only that "there are other confounding factors" but that actually the effect is the opposite?

I'm having a hard time grasping what evidence you have that even tried to suggest this.

This is just wrong sorry, it's well known that poorer countries have higher population growth across the board while richer countries have lower birth rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility#/media/Fi...

That's a completely different situation from someone being in poverty in a wealthy country.

Poor people in wealthy countries also tend to have more kids.

Those who experience wealth inequality or are otherwise economically disadvantaged in their own country may view national economic activity in the same way they view the stock market: with apathy. Having a job at all is the priority for many.

GDP is not a proxy for wealth inequality. For instance, Canada has much lower inequality than the US [1] (0.32 vs 0.47) and saw a much greater percentage of its country materialize through immigration, but still saw a greater increase in GDP over the same time period.

Wealth inequality is a symptom of government policy, nothing more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

You think a government can make inequality go away? Please give us one example

Sure, the Soviet Union. A government literally made inequality go away with the stroke of a pen. Ideal, of course not. Recommended? Definitely not. However, it's clear and self-evident that the US government allows wealthy people to keep their wealth. A wealth tax would solve that problem, for instance. Again, without advocating, I'm just saying that wealth and wealth inequality exist at the whim of the ruling class. I'm not sure I could come up with a counter-example that didn't involve a contrived crypto-ancap utopia.

The fact that income and wealth inequality are different in different countries is proof in and of itself.

> A government literally made inequality go away with the stroke of a pen.

This is an _incredibly_ rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union. I would suggest researching Waldsiedlung as a starting point.

Why would that be rose-tinted? I believe in the value of inequality, to a point. Where I disagree with the status quo is I don't think the top end should be effectively unlimited, and I think the bottom end should be a lot higher.

However to say that government policy can't substantially reduce inequality is patently absurd. The government has the power to take things from people, every year, in taxes.

> Sure, the Soviet Union. A government literally made inequality go away with the stroke of a pen.

You have no idea what you're talking about, just stop. Source: born in USSR

That's a straw man, nobody asked that inequality should go completely away.

The question is rather what is a healthy level of inequality and should the government work on increasing inequality.

Most people under estimate the amount of inequality in the US, this [1] is an awesome video illustrating it. Also there is some interesting research on modelling inequality as a phase change process and that there exist some point of no return after which inequality only increases towards a oligarchy/plutogarchy without a revolution type event [2]

[1] https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

Easily? The US government has the capability to do massive wealth redistribution very easily in a couple of weeks if they wanted to.

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