Basement Fertility
betonit.substack.com
betonit.substack.com
I don't see any correlation at all.
Though, often a rank vs. rank scatter plot is more enlightening than a scatter plot of the raw data.
In the meanwhile, I’m biased to buy the hypothesis and have reasonable trust in the studies Caplan quoted, but a graph would be properly convincing.
Living with parents doesn't carry the same stigma as in the US or Western Europe.
The reasons for low fertility have nothing to do with living with parents there. They have everything to do with complex and rapid social changes following the fall of communism which are too long and complex to get into.
I actually agree with the overall conclusion *in the US*, and likely in other parts of the world. However, the argument seems flakey.
So, maybe we just see wealth as a the root cause at play
It doesn't seem as much a difference but it is a really big one.
That's a surefire way to homelessness, unless you are very (SV engineer or doctor) rich.
But usually such opinions are fairly controversial, which suggests a clash of deeper underlying values.
That has zero to do with whether it is safe to move into in-laws house when you are entering vulnerable period of pregnancy and being primary caregiver for small kids. Because both severely limit your economic options even in best conditions.
That is generally only true until kids are in the picture, then the famous "what is best for the child" over rules all
Family courts take stability of the child over all else, so if the child is used to living in the family home who ever the custodial parent is will get possession of the home even if that custodial parent was not the owner of the home before the marriage
A house that was sole property before the marriage, remains sole property after the marriage, even if the other spouse is added to the deed. The other spouse only takes a "equitable interest" to the extent that marital resources, or their own separate resources, are invested in the house. This is the case in community property (like CA) and non-CP states (most of the rest).
The primary issue is that in some states the presumption changes when the spouse is added to the deed, so that the house is presumed to be marital property in the event of divorce until the pre-owning spouse shows that it is not. (But in most states, there is no presumption and the other spouse must show that they have an equitable interest in the house, generally by showing that marital resources were spent to pay the mortgage or make improvements.)
And we see that rent-vs-own is a thing as it is, so it fits (I've heard people say they will have kids once they buy their own place, etc).
There's lots of prosperous countries where renting is very common, is well-regulated, and not some great risk (Germany and Switzerland spring to mind).
I, too, live in a country where owning is the norm. That turns the rental market into (mostly) shabby flats for the very lowest income brackets, for students, for migrant workers, or for short-term renting. It doesn't have to be that way.
Renting is very popular in Germany because buying is out of reach for most due to how expensive it is, therefore those who aren't well off have no other choice but to rent, leading to old age poverty for those who don't own their own property by the time they retire.
That's why Italian pensioners are statistically better off than their German counterparts despite their country being poorer, because they own their own property at retirement, instead of paying market rent and having to search the city trash bins for empty bottles to make ends meet.
Most Germans with financial means or inheritance do own property since it's financially better than renting, especially when your old and living on a measly pension.
Not that I don't support rental regulations, I do, but the real estate market in Germany is broken and therefore is not what I consider a model to be followed by everyone.
In general, capital cities in Europe are extremely expensive, no matter whether we are talking about well-regulated Berlin or less-regulated Rome.
And the issue with Berlin isn't that renting is expensive, it's that you can't find anything decent at all. Properties disappear off websites within minutes due to over demand, and then, once you finally manage find something, you have to do a visit with 200 other people with a folder in hand with a lot of your private information, and pray to your lucky star that you'll be that one in 200 people to get it.
Back in the days, we used to have a once in a century virus/pandemic/plague that would "thin the heard", but now we got really good at creating effective vaccines and prioritizing distributing them at those old and vulnerable, to prevent nature from running its course, so we're back to square one.
So what do we do? Provide modern medicine only to able bodied adults and deprive the elderly once they reach their sell by date?
For what it's worth, it'd get the job done.
But that aside, for starters, we should have let covid-19 run its course. Vaccines, if any, should have been given to the people under 50 first. This would have helped balance things out a lot to begin with. Similarly, I think we should be more willing to turn to palliative care earlier in the case of declining health in the elderly.
Of course, I recognize that I'm basically just describing some flavor or utilitarianism and that it will never even be in the discussion of how things should be.
Houses weren't limited in availability, other things were the limiting factors - and sometimes "move in with" would mean moving in next door or into what were called "mother-in-law" houses.
1. Force to sell due to medicare or other end of life expenses (you can not have any assets if you need full time nursing care paid for by medicare)
2. the "Reverse mortgage" people fall for.
3. Baby Boomers, a Single Asset split 5-8 ways does not go far
4. the houses owned really were not that good. My Grandparents owned their home, bought it right after WWII, the house was a small 2 bed 1 bath they raised 4 kids in... It is still in the family but it is out-dated by modern standards.
that is 4, I am sure there are others
Young people complain how much more expensive homes are now, and then can't be bothered to accept a starter home..
"I just can't understand why I can't afford this 3,600 sq foot home near downtown Austin at age 25, life is unfair!".
The rest of your sentence doesn’t change this bit.
Tons of young people today won't even move to the valley or to another state.
I worked in car sales and basically every dealership mechanic over 28 owns a home. But tech people complain about how they can't buy one somehow.
Often it could be "afforded" by the HN-income crowd just by not buying a new car.
Similar to years past, except people are less willing to do that now.
Things like Minimum Lot size, out right restriction on size of home, and other "building codes" that have nothing to do with the safety or long term viability of a construction project
It is unlikely the development my grandparents home is in would get zoning approval should a developer seek to build a similar neighborhood today. The lots sizes would be too small, the homes would be too small, and various other things would be non-compliant with modern building codes which does not mean it would be unsafe.
Look at the Scandinavian, very deep green countries at the top of the map. They all have strictly regulated construction processes, with political involvement in city planning. It takes many long years of project planning before you can put a spade in the ground in Stockholm. What’s more, there is government meddling in rent setting - they are not free markets. Still, they seem to do OK?
I don’t know what the author has against housing regulations but this argument is missing some part.
The missing part is that the Scandinavian countries are high income-countries and have a lower population density, e.g.:
- Sweden: 25.4 inhabitants per km2
- Italy: 206 per Km2
(Both according to Google).
My point is that the author is trying to make an argument for deregulation of the housing market. Yet he is failing to actually state his argument.
How exactly do these two maps support an argument for deregulation?
And how do your two data points support it?
Buying is still possible, but the prices are extremely inflated due to the Swedish habit of simply not paying of their mortages and just pay the interest. Last time I heard, the Stockholm housing bubble is about to burst due to the increasing interest rates, potentially collapsing the Swedish housing market.
The Finnish housing market is cooler, but finding an apartment in the Helsinki or Turku areas is not easy, and they don't come cheap. Just like in the case of Stockholm, people with below-average income are more or less kept out of the city cores.
From what I've been told, it sounds like the situation in Denmark and Norway is similar.
Some claim this shortage is due to over-regulation of the housing market, others claim that it's due to other causes. Usually, this is split down ideological lines, where the left is for keeping the regulated rents, and the right are for introducing "market based rents".
But this is all irrelevant, because despite this well-documented housing shortage in Stockholm, and despite having a rent-controlled market and a huge presumed housing bubble, for some reason Sweden ranks as having only 4.1% basement dwellers (see OP).
So, explain again how this article on "Basement Fertility" is making a case for housing market deregulation?
It's an urban issue, and assuming ones's ready to move somewhere else then moving out is not a problem. That's what happens in many cases.
[0] free to play
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
There is a lot of evidence that high rates of living with parents south of Hajnal line is largely about sociocultural practices instead of economic conditions, and it goes back centuries, see eg. Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future, by Kevin MacDonald.
From African village model to the nuclear family is a massive step, made possible by the nation state. Arguably this impoverishes community/extended family life. The most extreme form can regularly be read in the news: somebody found dead in their home, undetected for weeks or months.
But not even that is enough. Even within the scope of the nuclear family are we further individualizing. Each partner in the couple is to be fully economically independent from the other. Note that I'm not suggesting any traditional angle here, I'm purely talking about individualism in general. Even within our very own family, we no longer dare to rely on each other, to be dependent on each other.
If I were to pick a cliche busy urban family, they have very few shared moments. They may not even eat together. They relax on their own individual device, often in separate rooms. And we outsource care for both our young and the old.
We drifted far from our roots.
We seem to function best at tribal scale. Jokes aside, most family units are functional.
Family scales well. Large-enough families invite dysfunction jokes, but they have a shared genetic interest. You can always coerce or compel family to do things like share resources or settle disputes against their own self-interest.
More than a few families together become a community, and this is where the problems start.
We look to colonizing space as the solution to overpopulation and resource depletion. Space is not a forgiving environment.
When water is running low or other critical challenges arise, a colony bound by blood will figure that shit out quicker than the space equivalent of your HOA.
Huh?
It's more about bypassing the politics normally associated with these sorts of situational negotiations-- a failsafe against one (or more) persons holding the rest of the colony hostage.
It is a paternalistic foil to malingering and selfishness.
Technology has enabled governments to grow massively, and law and order and prosperity removed the natural forces that kept communities together. Why put up with any communal norms you don't agree with when the community doesn't provide any additional safety or stability.
The strongest forces that once stood up to governments and markets are no longer relevant, in the West at least. Religion and tribalism are viewed as relics of the past, while the modern individual is naked and unarmed in the face of behemoth governments larger than the largest empires in human history.
I see it in the overreach of law enforcement because they correctly assume they're dealing with isolated individuals. In tribal societies, the tribe itself can stand up to the law. A person in such a society wouldn't be worried about being beaten by police because his family would beat the police.
But what you describe definitely rings true. Many of my friends grew up with two working parents in a nuclear family and didn’t realize how incredibly tough that is until they started having kids themselves.
My ideal is grandparents a few houses down, within a couple minutes walking distance.
These days, not only is the world population more urban, but people are also more consistently aware of the inequality problem. People are realizing they have no hope of providing the best opportunities for their children, and are deciding not to have them. I don't see that as a bad thing. Voluntary population decline might be the best outcome for humanity at this point, at least until we get our political, economic, and ecological shit together. We don't need 10 billion humans to be on the planet; we need to get through this era of war and capitalism without making ourselves extinct.
A lot of societies are about to find out the burden women were implicitly carrying simply because they had no choice, either due to lack of financial independence, birth control, or civil rights.
To use the phrase “die out” stinks 30’s Germany to me, and I think you could stand to think twice before using such verbiage.
>Vive la France?
> No one would be left to appreciate the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe.
> French scientists were concerned about the nation’s birth rate 100 year ago. In 1860, there had been 1 million births in the country. In 1922, the number had fallen to 450,000.
> As one observer noted: “At the rate of decline in number of children born in that country, in the year 2022 — 100 years hence — there will be nobody left in France, except as they drift in from other sections of Europe. The figures show, unerringly, that the present rate of decrease, maintained for 100 years, would reduce the birthrate to zero.”
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/2021/12/27/experts-...
And what happened in the 20th century post WW2? A French Baby Boom driven by increased marital fertility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom#Eur...
> France and Austria experienced the strongest baby booms in Europe.[19] In contrast to most other countries, the French and Austrian baby booms were driven primarily by an increase in marital fertility.[28] In the French case, pronatalist policies were an important factor in this increase.[29] Weaker baby booms occurred in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands.[30]
We really have no idea what is going on with fertility and what the end result will be. When population was booming everyone predicted mass starvation that didn't happen. Now when population is declining everyone is confidently predicting disaster, but who's to say it won't self-correct? (alongside appropriate societal efforts)?
The two big changes from previous decades are women’s financial independence and birth control methods that are 100% effective and relatively convenient and cheap, essentially separating the acts of having sex and becoming parents.
Let us not forget the downward pressure this labor surplus created on wages.
I can't speak for elsewhere, but American society seems to incentivize against the factors that allow for high fertility. I think it is also apparent in Asia with the Sampo/ Satori generation phenomenon in Korea and Japan respectively.
The ecosystem we exist in / that sustains us surely has a carrying capacity.
If you have the opinion that there are insufficient resources in the world to live the lifestyle you want for yourself or those you care about, you may think a lower fertility rate is more “right”. And if you think your tribe is in a competition for resources with all the other tribes, then you may want a higher fertility rate for your tribe and a lower one for the others.
That said, I'm of the opinion that we'll never really need to have any tough conversations about birth rates because they've fallen so drastically across the board. It seems that it will be enough to universally encourage higher birth rates in every nation for the foreseeable future (with the expected outcome being that most will still struggle to hit 2.1).
Incentivizing a woman to have a baby is extremely expensive, and I do not think any country has come up with an offer so attractive such that it causes birth rates to go up.
Which brings up 2 questions: how much does a society have to offer women, and would that society continue to be competitive on a global playing field relative to other countries that might go a different way, such as restricting women’s rights and getting birth rates up by removing women’s agency.
The USA just did this.
Only if you're the sort of person who cares about such things. I don't see any moral imperative to make sure any particular ethnicity or culture continues.
Before someone calls me the usual assortment of bad things, please take a moment to consider (1) the difference between treating existing people well and making new people, and (2) that I mean this literally and not in the "all the cultures besides the US should go away" sense, and would still take this position even in the blatantly racist "but that means you'd be a minority" situation you're about to try to catch me with.
Of course the term minority/majority is relative to the scope you're talking about, too. The "majority" of Americans are global minorities.
Mask off moment there.
> Are some groups "allowed" this, and not others?
So no, my position is that no groups are "allowed" this.
Another way I can express this, that may be more clear, is that a culture isn't a thing on its own. It's a description of the way its members live. Those members may be very attached to that way of life, and it is immoral to take it from them (see (1) above), but the question of whether new people start living in that way is morally neutral.
The global optimum matters (IMO) more than an assumption of “whatever we have is just right”
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
[2] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/1...
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
Subsaharan Africa was completely bypassed by the Green Revolution and largely lacks access to basic infrastructure like eg consistent electricity (outside portable fuel powered generators) on the typical small, family, partly subsistence based farm.
It’s not a solved problem with all the geographical and political issues, but it’s quite literally the world’s last frontier for trade.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02522-6
Population growth fell much faster than expected in many places such as Singapore and Iran. Today in Africa people have mobile phones and hence much better access to information on things like birth control.
That Nature article shows that the population expected at 2100 has a realistic range from about 9 Bn to 11 Bn. That difference comes from slightly different assumptions about the change in birth rates in Africa and other places.
From the article :
"In 2014, a group at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna produced its own forecast. It said that world population is most likely to peak at 9.4 billion around 2070 and will fall to 9 billion by the end of the century. The group’s numbers rose slightly in a 2018 report3 that projected a peak of about 9.8 billion around 2080; a subsequent update has population cresting at a little under 9.7 billion around 2070."
I think you're deriding my use of "Carrying capacity" as an archaic concept, but your retort is that we're "creating ecosystems."
But, every organism within an ecosystem "creates" it just by existing as part of it, so I'm assuming you mean "heavily modifying it to suit our species' need for insatiable growth."
Taking this from that perspective, the 20th century agricultural explosion (that you link to ) is a prime example of how we've hijacked systems far beyond their natural limits, to largely deleterious effect.
That wikipedia article even enumerates some of these: biodiversity loss, GHG emissions, etc. There are many examples elsewhere [0].
Sure, there's a lot more food, and that's good for population health and well-being. But that "good" assumes that we've decided that large, consistent growth rates are "good."
[0]:https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=imp...
Worrying about the ideal balance of births : deaths, today, is like worrying about ballast in a sinking ship. Insatiable growth doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t for some time, we’re squarely in flattening the curve territory with the fun twist that discharges take 18 years to raise.
As an aside: Would it be possible to favourite a reply? I have only figured out how to do that with submissions.
Conversely, depopulation on an otherwise healthy planet is a trivially solvable problem. Our species IS entirely capable of reproducing (even though the secret to doing so may have fallen into obscurity in certain incel segments of society).
Not Civil, Mechanical, or other engineers.
Also venture capital has no interest in fighting 1000's environmental lawsuits and 10,000's of pointless regulations designed to stop any construction or development that would improve CA
> Not Civil, Mechanical, or other engineers.
What on earth makes you think that? All sorts of hardware is designed and developed here. It has the largest aerospace sector of any state. A lot of automotive design is done in the LA basin for the auto majors.
And that’s just off the top of my head. I’m in SV and even up here though we lost most of the defense manufacturing (e.g. tanks and ships) though a lot remains further south, when I need parts machined there are still plenty of local machine shops etc. I’ve brought in welders from the Central Valley when local ones were too busy.
>> A lot of automotive design is done in the LA basin for the auto majors.
Source...
>when I need parts machined there are still plenty of local machine shops etc.
There are plenty of machine shops in my town, I would not proclaim my town to be a mecca of engineering.
> I’ve brought in welders from the Central Valley when local ones were too busy.
Ok, and?
It feeds that large patch of green/farms/food entirely surrounded by sand, and drains north into the inland sea created by the first botched attempt at diverting in the 1900s.
That’s arguably the least important part of the state that isn’t desert (anymore), and a small scale version of what we’ve done to the Central Valley.
The much derided (sometimes rightly so tho’) subject of Evolutionary Psychology will probably have a couple of books worth to support that.
We are literally unable to do that. The only thing we know how to do is burn more fossil fuels which has nothing to do with human effort.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of people I've met - from all walks of life and religious/political leanings - will answer this question with an unthinking "yes, of course that's bad".
I've been curious lately why this is. From the standpoint of Christianity, isn't the end goal rapture followed by total extinction anyway? From the standpoint of agnosticism/atheism, wouldn't an extinction mean the end of human suffering?
Why are we as a species so afraid of not being able to sustain ourselves through a constant churning of new births? Is it just our monkey brain ultimately calling the shots?
Or rather, if you choose to replace your monkey brain value system with some better value system, such choice can be made only under your monkey brain value system. Value-system-yet-to-be-adopted is not your value system yet (entire question is about whether it should be your value system) and can't be the basis of your choice. (Yes, humans often make mistakes here, but that's because humans are vulnerable to circular reasoning, not because circular reasoning is valid.)
Why even give birth to humans that are most likely not wanted in this world?
I think most people can achieve happiness in their situation, even under bad conditions, if they have a sound mind. Those elites might have a better shot at accidental happiness, but being upset over that will do nothing good for your own state of mind, so why let it bring you down? You can't change how the world works.
Happiness comes from within, and from meaningful social connections.
Social security relies of the young bearing the burden of the old. Don't even get me started on the intangible energy of having little kids around. Not everyone wants kids, but most people like being a cool uncle/aunt.
> What's the "right" value for TFR?
Difficult problems exist in Grays. But even the most fervent believers on either side agree that the 'right number' is likely between and 1.5-2.5. With western TFR plummeting under 1.5, we can safely say the the call for 'more kids' is effectively a call for a slower decline in population; not 'more kids'.
> carrying capacity
Yep, that ecosystem is called the economy and the carry capacity is a lower bound, not an upper bound. Too few young people is the death knell of a civilization.
Also, population explosion is presently led by Africa in rates, and South Asia in sheer numbers. A few dozen more/less westerners (who're we kidding? mostly white people) isn't going to change the numbers by much.
Currently growing population seems to still be an economically net-positive thing as we still need people in order to do new and bigger things. I think though that soon it will become net-negative as average person's total lifetime productivity will be losing to automation and you don't need 20+ years to start the robot up and 20+ years to take care about that robot once it got worn out. In that situation we'd better have less people yet more educated, trained etc. in order to be productive beyond what is replaceable by more and more automation.
Probably somewhere between 1.8 and 2.2. Rapid increases or declines in population create economic disruptions. Even if you favor a less (or more!) populated world, it's better for us to get there slowly.
The social, cultural and economic implications of an older population are very likely to be profound. A rapid demographic 'crunch' is not a good idea. One example is that nobody is quite sure how to keep funding socialised healthcare and support aged care in the face of a transition to an increasingly elderly and infirm population who don't earn income. We will see it playing it out initially between countries with older demographics (Italy, Japan) and younger demographics (India, African nations, even the USA is relatively young).
7x population growth, shift from 80% rural to 90% urban. Where "rural" is low economic engagement and "urban" is a job-holder. shift from single-earning families to dual-earner, where again a stay-at-home mom does not increase the size of the economy while a working one does (and please, I know this is unfair and the tremendous value a full time Mom provides).
Multiple these three shifts and you get a pretty big increase in the economy, with zero increase in productivity.
Look at Japan. Japan's population has been on the decline for about 1.5 generations. They still get as much food, shelter, and entertainment as any other developed economy. They have hobbies, travel, discretionary income... The worries there aren't about capitalism failing.
Demographic collapse just has a lot of nasty social consequences in general. An inverted pyramid spells pain for future generations.
I don't think an inverted pyramid is as bad as it sounds. It's a check against ageism and falling wages (there's no longer a horde of hungry young people who want the jobs) and, given how little of the work people do is actually necessary--white-collar jobs are 85% sending passive-aggressive emails--I think society can afford it. It might be the only thing that provides enough value of labor to keep conditions relatively humane.
Taxpayer funded (which is what “public” generally means) pensions are basically the only defined benefit pensions left in the US. I do not know of a single city, county, state, or federal government that has gotten rid of them, especially not for cops.
“public employee pensions” are a different thing.
(But neither is gone, in general or in the US, though more and more government employee positions in the US are relying more on defined contribution retirement plans and less on defined benefit pensions.)
But if you're hoping for something closer to the modern, Western ideal - education until age ~25, work until age ~60, retirement until age ~90 - then the inverted pyramid is going to need at least one of:
(1) Armies of imported service workers - to staff all the nursing homes, retirement homes, cruise ships, restaurants, etc. that the huge "top" of that pyramid need / want.
(2) Armies of robots so advanced that they can fill the great majority of those jobs. WithOUT requiring an extra army of humans to build, pay for, maintain, run, etc. those service worker robots.
(3) Huge changes in medical technology and social expectations, so that most of those service workers are never needed.
They could easily assume 0% expected return on investment, but that would make it so the cash expenses today would explode, to the same level that they would if they simply paid employees the cash. Which is why politicians like to run on campaigns promising lower taxes, and in order to achieve that, they assume future economic growth so that instead of paying someone $10 today, the government can pay $1, and rely on economic growth to provide the other $9 (assuming purchasing power of the currency remains the same, which it will not).
It's mostly seen as a bad thing in the lens of ethnic nationalist ideology that low fertility rates will change the demographics of a country (see Great Replacement [0]).
After all, if Musk (and other capitalists) needed, they can get labor from other countries south of America's borders, but there is a push to not make these workers Americans! This isn't an issue only in America either.
>[...] is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory [...]
Native Americans would disagree.
It's a (bullshit paranoid) predictive theory about the modern day that has nothing to do with the historical genocide of Native Americans by white people.
It's been around for a lot longer than 2010. It has been a popular subject matter in Europe for decades [1]. I guess someone just decided to finally put a more official, catchy title to it and publish books. Does this particular author have a racist tone? Perhaps they do. But ask an average European citizen back in late 80s, 90s and they'd tell you what's up without skipping a beat. It's something you can see from a mile away. Pleading ignorance won't help.
[1] Your media won't tell you this, so don't be surprised. Talk to a handful of locals to get a sample for how people really feel about things. It's a much better barometer than getting your news from something like Voice of America.
It's the same argument wielded to discriminate against immigrants. It was used against the Irish, Italians, and Polish in NY City to name a few. Each group was "ruining America". It takes 3 generations to assimilate, but everyone anti-immigration wants them to "speak American" in one generation.
The "Great Replacement" specifically talks about this as being a deliberate plan by "wealthy elites", and again, is racist paranoid bullshit.
If you're going to talk about a specific thing, you can't just generalise it to every concern around immigration.
And while there are genuine concerns around immigration, like housing capacity, how to help migrants settle in, etc., most "people on the street" are just complaining about lazy immigrants who are simultaneously "stealing our jobs" and going on benefit.
to outsource raising children to places that can do it for less & ensure competition for low-paid jobs stays high...
what difference does it make
It’s not bullshit. The UN itself is where the term originated and it’s clear that whites are being replaced. The questions are whether that’s an undesirable thing and what the best course of mitigation is.
Typically, once people admit that, they start trying to justify why whites should be replaced. However, any argument justifying white replacement can be used equally effectively for any other group (e.g. Israelis, Muslims, Chinese, blacks, etc). IMHO best not to attempt to replace anyone so that we don’t devolve into Hitlers.
The problem for many first world countries today is that their populations are shaped like upside down pyramids- many old people and people nearing retirement age and much fewer young and working age people. Why is this a problem? The working age population represents the tax and production base that supports the non-working and non-tax contributing older population, the non-working young people represent the replacement for the working age people that will eventually retire.
I guess part of the problem is maybe some of this is too much like socialism and/or being able to give non-working persons actual dollars.
One of the major issues faced by the Nordic countries is that healthcare workers are quitting ing large numbers and starting to take direct action like strikes in order to improve working conditions.
In Denmark and Finland there was direct government intervention when nurses went on strike (or threatened in Finland's case); a highly unconventional move considering the fact that both countries grant workers the right to use strikes as a tool in collective bargaining. Both the Danish and the Finnish governments are lead by Social Democrats, the political movement traditionally directly connected with the labour unions.
That taken into account, the health care sector doesn't just need some intervention. It requires large-scale restructuring in order to make it a more attractive sector to work in.
Land, houses will not go up in value if there would be not enough people to buy them. While yes people migrate to the cities or to areas like Randstad and while yes there is housing shortage in such areas but if immigration from rural areas drops a lot there is going to be drop in housing prices.
More people have more diverse needs which creates demand - more people more demand - easier to have higher quality of life if it is easier to find 100 customers to come to your shop than 10 customers.
People are not starting new grocery shops in rural areas because it is good investment - mostly it is that they already live there and have possibility to make additional income on property they own.
People are starting new grocery shops in big cities even if they have to lease property to do so, because they still can profit on top of that.
Infinite growth is also required for high quality of life unfortunately.
Once there is no promise of future earnings by spending now - we start going into zero sum game. Living in a society where every day you have to worry about not loosing piece of pie is really a bad life to live.
Less people means lower pressure to find new ways of getting resources - if there is enough people on earth we might have enough money to get resources from astro-mining if needed.
People can still (on average) have career growth by taking an ever larger piece of the pie. And then they retire/die, leaving more pie for the young ones.
Also, we have the tech to make this pie comfortably big.
A population drop implodes all of it. Of course, presently, it may already be collapsing. When it does, I don't think that the Fed is going to respond by tightening and letting things correct to a healthier slow growth sustainable economy funded through real savings and value production. They will most likely immediately attempt to reinflate the bubbles with negative rates (0.00% FOMC, < 10% reserve requirement, and purchase operations on the open market).
This is symbiosis, not a scheme.
Like them or not, the older folks literally built and/or paid for everything the young end up inheriting. The young are otherwise parasites.
You're talking about how low interest rates are a Ponzi scheme yet it doesn't occur to you that maintaining positive interest forever is an even bigger Ponzi scheme.
Because you'll live way past your productive years and the things you will consume (services, goods, medical, etc.) still need to be produced/done by someone.
The automation aspect in economy has been way overestimated - truck drivers were supposed to be automated 5 years ago, meanwhile we are facing real world issues because of truck driver shortages.
Even jobs that were considered trivial to automate like cashers are still performed by humans - after decades of self checkout tech.
Unless your retirement plan is a shotgun barrell - you need the next generation to both live their lives comfortably and provide for you.
This is exponantial growth.
No, it probably just means population declines need be very slow and graceful (e.g. very close to steady-state) in order to not create big labor shortages simultaneous with large retiree populations.
That's no longer true in my part of the world. In the supermarkets I frequent, I'm pretty sure that well over 2/3 of revenue is self-scanned.
Change often takes multiple decades. That doesn't mean it's not happening.
Or at least all the people buying 20 items or less will, or whatever the figures may be. In previous example, take the 20 checkout lanes, leave 10 staffed by a few employees, and install 20 self check out terminals staffed by a few employees. Direct everyone with full carts to the employees, and people with few items to the self checkout.
Not really. It feels like every few months we get another piece decrying the lack of truck drivers, only for it to gloss over issues of pay. There is no shortage of truck drivers; there's a shortage of places that don't try to exploit them.
I wonder how much of that shortage is due to over-hyped predictions about future automation? The predictions don't pan out but succeed at discouraging people from joining the profession.
> Even jobs that were considered trivial to automate like cashers are still performed by humans - after decades of self checkout tech.
Self-checkout is not actually automation. It's just outsourcing the job of cashier to a customer who then works for free.
That's 50 years; a decent chunk of time.
By the way; its important to note that the replacement fertility rate changes over time. Today, in the US, infant mortality rates are half that in 1970 and prior, in basically every category. Ideally, obviously, the replacement rate will approach 2.0.
Is there a version of economic thought that doesn't necessitate constant population growth? How about the one we're living? You can make the argument that the world is falling apart, or the economy, or we're at the end of a totally normal 80-100 year economic cycle, or maybe everything is fine, that's all supposition. What's real is; we're still going.
The short answer to your question is: historically: No. Empires fall when population growth stalls. When empires fall, a LOT of people die, and a lot more suffer. The dream of "isolated sustainable communes" doesn't work at scale. If your argument is some variation of: the human population shouldn't be at scale; then feel free to remove yourself from the equation as a start down that path, but realistically, we're all here, we have the system we have.
However, I tend to believe that the better argument is: we found that version of economic thought which can work in the face of stagnating population growth. Its the one we have; it does work, not perfectly, in fact quite poorly, but we'll never know how bad the alternate realities are. In effect, MMT.
Its extremely and critically important to recognize that technology has jumped more in the last thirty years than in the thousands of years prior. Our relationship to it, as individuals and as a society, is still evolving, and that evolution is happening in the face of declining western populations. Technology amplifies individual productivity; so why are we all still working 40 hour weeks? Momentum primarily, but more specifically: our population only recently started plateauing. We needed technology to keep up; its the only way. But as population plateaus, technology will naturally take over more. Its not just "fewer people can do more"; it goes from "fewer people can do more for more people" to "fewer people can do more for fewer people", which naturally means they have to do less.
MMT plays into that because: technology is expensive. If we're entering a world where our options are: build a $50B water barrier around Miami or let the city drown, we can't afford to worry about the status of our gold reserves, or whether the blockchain is up today. We wouldn't have the money; we'd chose not to build it; billions of dollars in infrastructure, land, and people would be destroyed; and the economy would be worse off, not better, than if we had just said "blank check do it" and then dealt with the ramifications of that decision tomorrow.
That doesn't mean there won't be ramifications. There always are in complex systems. But people get so focused on the reality we're living, to say "if only we'd have stuck to the way we used to do it", without recognizing that its just as possible you, and all your friends, and all your friends' friends, would not be alive if we had stuck to that old system.
Here's the biggest kink though; generally, well-implemented MMT (which much like well-implemented communism, hasn't been done, but has been written about to great lengths) requires close coordination between monetary and legislative policy; something our government is engineered to not do. We're seeing the impacts of this miscoordination now; there's a strong argument that the biggest source of inflation today has less to with money printing or interest rates, and more to do with core productivity in the sectors experiencing that inflation (energy: oil processing, housing: home building, public transit construction, etc). Core productivity (more factories, more construction, automation, etc) can oftentimes be solved with cheap, targeted money; but the Fed is currently engaged in a show of raising interest rates. Its the one lever they have; every problem is a screw, they have their directive: a hammer. I don't feel this is doom and gloom, today; a lot of the issues we're experiencing are, truly, just the delayed echoes of COVID which will die out, raising interest rates will legitimately help some sources of inflation, and the legislature has demonstrated interest in providing cheap money for productivity improvements (build back better). But, its still how the Fed operates; they have their doctrine and their lever, and its easy to imagine a future where more coordination is necessary to push through massive spending in response to major issues like the climate crisis, declining water supplies, etc, without either succumbing to the crisis, or creating a new economic crisis.
Here's a 2010 review suggesting population decline is no biggie: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep/article-abstract/26/4/583/453...
Here's a recent paper on the topic: https://www.bde.es/f/webbde/INF/MenuHorizontal/SobreElBanco/...
Update: here's a paper by Charles Jones. This might be better because (1) Charles Jones is rather famous growth economist and (2) it focuses specifically on population decline rather than population ageing.
The vintage-futurism economic dream of 10 hour workweeks will be tough to achieve if we need many in the working age population taking care of the elderly.
They mayor Unterguggenberger implemented a demurrage currency during the great depression in Wörgl and it solved the unemployment and budget deficit problem without inflation.
I suspect this might have something to do with perception of supportive community rather than actual numbers. When to-be parents feel like they are on their own and neither $jobPeople, $friendlyPeople nor $familyPeople are actually going to help, they might be inclined to postpone.
Living with parents in a sane multi-generational arrangement might translate to more support and thus more children. Living with parents out of sheer necessity where parents look down on their offspring for not proving themselves in the world probably would not.
But that does not really explain scandinavia either.
I certainly want to live closer to my parents but the multi-generational arrangement needs to provide space to live in, I can't share the same flat my parents are living in, come on it's too small.
The problem is having a private space, not living with parents. If parents can provide a flat with a seperate entry, even that would work.
Woah, why can’t you, or you + 1, chip in here?
I assume that if GP had a well paid job, they would move out to separate flat, rather than move parents into bigger flat. Wouldn’t you?
You can of course chip in pay rent etc. But wouldn't it be nice to know that the flat is owned by your parents/family.
From where I come from, this is a normal arrangement.
Not that I condone such practices, but how does that not affect birth rate in India?
How about making a map of countries with free/subsidized childcare and comparing it to that fertility map? I’m pretty sure you’d find nearly the same correlation as with “not living with your parents”.
Sure, Italy has fertility of 1.27. But Norway has fertility of 1.53! Comparing these is like comparing two ends of the Titanic. One end is sinking underwater. The other is relatively higher. But it will be underwater too a few hours later. 1.27 augurs rapid population collapse. 1.53 augurs slightly slower population collapse.
If you think far-below-replacement fertility is bad, then Scandinavia does not have the solution.
Look, I can do this too:
* highly-developed western societies have lots of regulation
* highly-developed western societies have low birth rates
* highly-developed western societies have a high percentage of lawyers per capita
ergo, lawyers decrease the birth rate?
Now a days, its having a property which exceeds todays low quality building standards, isnt n housing estate slave box on some brown field site that will keep health professionals busy the longer someone lives on the site in a country where the politicians are too stupid to hide their criminal association, which pretty much rules out everywhere except Antartica!
That. X being correlated with Y can mean that Z is causing both. "Fertility" and "living with parents" are each highly dependent variables, dependent on all sorts of things.
Let's remember "natural experiments." Aren't there any?
A country that suddenly deregulated housing? Where there were suddenly major tax incentives for having kids (looking at you, Hungary)? Two countries that are exactly the same except that one has dramatically different housing costs, or fertility?
Without some data like that, I'm not buying any causation arguments.
Africa, China and Asia have healthy fertility because they have community and multigenerational family units. Not big homes.
"Asia" is pretty broad, but India was at 2.2 in 2020 and dropping pretty rapidly; as of earlier this spring it hit 2.0. Note that the Statista numbers are moving 5-year averages, so the "spot" number for India is lower than the number you see on that graph.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034075/fertility-rate-w... puts "Asia" as a whole at 2.15, which is indeed "healthy", but the slope is very much down.
Africa does have higher fertility, but from what I can tell the main reason is lack of access to birth control, not "community" or "big homes"...
Population grows exponentially and it is also a function of time. I don’t think we should look at it in decades but rather as through lenses that capture time in centuries.
The operative word being "had". It hasn't had one in a while.
> Population grows exponentially
It really depends. It does if you assume TFR is a constant, but it tends to not be constant.
> I don’t think we should look at it in decades but rather as through lenses that capture time in centuries.
In the "centuries" timeframe, technological change (much reduced infant mortality, availability of contraception, career opportunities, etc) pretty much dominates the TFR situation.
No. Not even close. Once developers get into this, they always seek to achieve the highest price as possible.
> Deregulation leads to low prices which leads to ample living space
This is only true when there is desirable livable space, affordable materials to build the housing, cheap labor, and honest people who are doing the construction.
Regulation front: I do agree that overly strict zoning causes a lot of issues. However, we have an aggressively (some call it exceptional individualism) caustic population of people.
Economics still will fly in the face of the author here: An increase in population and a push for a mass audience.. that's going to create a scaricity in places they want to live. That will increase the total overall cost (cost to government for services, infrastructure, infrastructure pressure [this is more of a case in road based transit], land space/value, etc)
If only competition was possible, to drive down developers’ market power, so their economic profits were driven down. One might do this by allowing many developers to build, and making the factors of production going into making housing plentiful. One might make building tall buildings legal, or building densely, for example.
Only the super-rich reaps the benefits of having a very large population.
I am pretty sure we can adapt easily before going extinct.
This is not a problem yet, and we're historically not very good at predicting the future, it won't happen overnight.
By the way, it is my understanding that politicians in Ancient Rome were also worried about the natality issue, for some time as you can see here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Julia
It is my pet theory that "modern" religions were inspired by those concerns and incorporated them in their own texts.
Those threads show thousands and thousands of replies by young people about how they can barely take care of themselves. High cost of living, no access to housing, unaffordable healthcare, etc.
What is not intuitive is that this reasoning, even though it feels so right and just, is entirely wrong. If you were to be wealthier, you'd not have more children. Add even more wealth and you'd have even fewer, not more. The wealthier people are, the less children they have on average.
The other insight you'll get is the gloomy image people have of the future. This really needs work. As humanity we need to have a better story than "it's all downhill from here".
I think the way we are likely to solve our greatest issues like climate change through having more smart, well-educated, well-raised, and loved children. So if you're privileged enough to have the capacity to raise such children it's probably one of the greatest things you can do for the future health of this planet (and if you still feel torn about the overall population rate you can still apply this logic to adoption).
If all the altruistic people depopulate themselves, then only the least altruistic will remain.
...with negative externalities. Low price, high cost living.
More likely low fertility and small houses are caused by the same thing, rather one by the other
Record-scratch: I associate that name with dumb twitter takes