The Fertility Implosion | Hacker News Reader

The Fertility Implosion

nytimes.com

43 pointstokenadult42 comments

This is silly.

> Usually, high religious observance and low income go along with high birthrates

No, usually what goes along with high birthrates is an agrarian peasant society that has to maintain high birthrates because 50%+ of children die before the age of 5, and if you want to have several kids of working age around to help in the fields, you need to aim for 8 or 12 newborns. Agrarian peasant societies happen to be poor and religious, but those are effects, not causes. Other contributing factors: women without independent income and therefore beholden to their husbands, no access to contraceptives, lack of basic literacy and education especially among girls.

Then what happens when places get improved sanitation and healthcare, pretty consistently everywhere we look at the data, is that there’s a demographic bubble when a generation has mothers survive all their pregnancies and all their 8-12 kids survive to adulthood. Then in the next generation or two, that falls to 4-6 kids on average because, hey, 50% aren’t dying anymore. Then by 2-3 generations after that, it’s down to 2-3 kids on average, or in some places even below replacement levels. Other contributing factors: migration to cities, access to contraceptives, and education especially of girls.

If you work in a factory or an office or a store, and live in a city, it’s just not convenient to start having kids at age 16 or to end up with 8 kids running around, even if you’re poor or religious. Already, 50% of the world population is urban, and within another generation that will be 60%.

> The speed of the change is breathtaking

The same demographic changes everywhere else in the world happened or are happening roughly at the same speed. There’s an incredible drop in fertility rate within 2-3 generations every time. For example, you see precisely the same pattern happening within the last few decades in rural Mexico, and if you look back several generations, the same pattern sweeping across Europe.

That Brooks thinks the changes in Oman &c. are surprising says more about Brooks than about the changes here.

You've forgotten the role conflicts can play in birthrates, for example to ensure one group remains dominant. [1]

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

In general what you say is true, but there are some exceptions. The Hasidic Jews are one of the most fertile groups in the US, and they are low income, highly religious, but urban (most of them live in New York City).

You might think they're an insignificantly small group, but the counterintuitively fast nature of exponential population growth means that they'll become surprisingly large surprisingly quickly. They're culturally immune to the influences that caused fertility to collapse in others and they're unlikely to voluntary limit their fertility.

>>But, over the long term, it’s better to have a growing work force, not one that’s shrinking compared with the number of retirees.<<

Why is this true? It seems to be taken as granted that this is true. I don't think that having a growing workforce that is barely earning a living is such a good thing.

It just seems unsustainable to think that we can depend on a growing workforce indefinitely to support the growing number of retirees. Long term it will be better to figure out technological solutions to this problem, i.e. robotics.

Hopefully with a reduced workforce we can focus more on quality of life.

Edit: I guess the reason this quote bothers me so much is that increasing the population in a lot of countries would mean bringing new babies to a life of poverty and misery. Why not focus on fixing the quality of life thing first?

Edit2: This is a response to the comment:

>>A lot of people would be surprised to learn that the impoverished peoples in a many those countries are a lot happier we expect. All-in-all they aren't much less happy than we are.<<

I think you may be right. I was probably just projecting. Still, being below the poverty line brings a lot of problems. Tens of millions of people die just from hunger every year or from diseases that are simple to cure or prevent in the developed world. That is probably the kind of misery I'm talking about.

> I guess the reason this quote bothers me so much is that increasing the population in a lot of countries would mean bringing new babies to a life of poverty and misery.

A lot of people would be surprised to learn that the impoverished peoples in a many those countries are a lot happier we expect. All-in-all they aren't much less happy than we are.

Not saying that wealth isn't a good thing, but it doesn't seem to be a major determining factor in happiness. Not unless you're too poor to get your 1,800 calories or you think you're entitled to wealth you don't have, anyway.

I am not refuting your point ("money does not happiness make") but AFAIK, it is a known fact that people tend to a state of average happiness no matter what their condition is (e.g. if they lack the ability to walk or if they own private jets).

But there is a correlation between the youth/child death rate and the number of kids, and it can be generally agreed death impairs the pursuit of happiness.

(Though, quite likely child death implies many kids, not the other way around)

> Why is this true?

Because of something called the "Dependency Ratio": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_ratio

The basic concept is that in order for there to be a high quality of life for most people in a society, the majority of them need to be capable of doing economically productive work. Otherwise you have a large number of dependents (juveniles and/or retirees) whose sustenance must somehow be garnered from a relatively small number of workers.

In China, for example, demographers talk about the "4:2:1 generation", which is the long-term effect of improving longevity combined with the one-child policy. This means that there could be four retired grandparents and two retired parents to every one working individual. Somehow, the social services for six people would have to be supported off the tax revenue from one. That's just not possible, and could very easily lead to a bad outcome for society as a whole.

(This isn't to discount the problems that come from overpopulation -- I'm just pointing out that it cuts both ways).

Too-rapid population growth can also lead to high dependency ratios -- in the form of children rather than the elderly -- and this also makes it difficult/impossible to support adequate social programmes. Historically, the best-performing economies tend to be those with very low dependency ratios, which is typically the result of a baby boom that is quickly followed by a baby bust. That produces a bulge of economically productive workers, the revenue from which can be spent on things like infrastructure and investment rather than social-support programmes which have less of an impact on GDP.

(Incidentally, this is a large part of the reason why China is going so bonkers with infrastructure development, building high-speed rail and ghost cities for which there is arguably no market. They're doing this because now is the only time they can. In 15 years, China as a whole will be substantially wealthier -- with enough people who are genuinely able to afford high-end condominiums and high-speed rail -- but at that point their youth bulge will be gone, scarcity of labour will drive up wages, most government revenue will have to go to healthcare and social services, and they'll have no ability build that kind of infrastructure. So they're building it while they can, well in advance of their actual need for it, which is actually pretty damn clever.)

What surprises me is that they consider low fertility rate a problem. There are plenty of people from other countries that would be willing to work in Western countries with low fertility rate.

If fertility rates are below replacement level, then let them be and let immigrants from a third world country work in their place. There are plenty of people in this world already.

American fertility is heavily stratified by education; less educated women reproduce significantly more:

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/09/28/americas-fe...

And race, and wealth, and even political views:

> Mean number of offspring

> Wealthy liberal women (n = 35) 1.60

> Wealthy conservative women (n = 43) 2.49

> The difference is statistically significant. Wealthy white conservative women average 55 percent more kids than their liberal counterparts.

http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2012/03/fertility-among-weal...

The real moral of the story? Health care startups in the next 20 years will be hot, as most of our world transitions to taking care of an increasingly elderly generation, robotics fill highly repeatable labor, and the resource crunch makes goods last longer.

I can already see the reaction to acqui-hires. The sick should love having their services sunsetted.

Ah, but direct to consumer isn't necessarily the right play in this market. HIPPA is still a major pain, and the sick (and families of the sick) tend to have less cash. (Though, they have a lot of points where their lives could be made better by software. The low hanging fruit has been done in the app store, of course.)

Further, if you go B2B, the aqui-hire might be more interesting if you have multiple hospital groups that like your product. (for example) In fact, it makes you more likely to be acquired for your technology.

Or you may be acquired by a bigco and your product killed to eliminate nascent competition. Frankly, I'm not convinced the usual VC-funded startup ecosystem is a great match for healthcare. If you think consumers might be afraid of companies going out of business, you should see how some of a) large businesses that make all decisions for five years at a time or b) small practices that still use Access and macros from 2001 because they work feel about the situation.

On an abstract level it does seem better to have a large number of young people to care for a small number of retirees, but that would create an unsustainable pyramid scheme in a country like China. Many parts of the world are already overpopulated and low fertility is pretty much the best case scenario.

All of that aside, I also think that there are factors more important than the relative number of old people in a given population. Technological development, public health, etc. are all probably more important, and some of those factors are at odds with high fertility.

I've always believed in "Quality of Life", over "Quantity of Life". And reading stories like these gives me hope for the planet. I'm not sure we can handle 10 billion people living off of it simultaneously. Just look at all the problems we've got with only 7 billion and the upcoming food and resource shortages.

Smaller populations living great full lives is so much better than massive populations living terribly. Economically, investors don't like shrinking populations because they make their money from growth and consumerism, but environmentally this is wonderful news.

Looks like, in its own way, nature is starting to balance things out once again.

10 billion human beings is nothing, especially when you consider that we absorb more energy from the sun in one hour than do humanity use in one year.

Resource isn't much of a problem either if you consider nuclear energy and asteroid mining. Currently we either don't exploit it due to the political environment, or can't exploit it due to technological limits.

I would argue that the food storage and resource storage are a result of institutional and societal problems. That is, war and corruption done more than enough to incite famine and other ills while undeveloped markets disrupt our ability to distribute food and other resources to those that need it the most.

Plus, there's something to be said for humans as the storage of knowledge and expertise. Humanity built entire civilization based on division of labor and specialization, not on the back of a few genius. The more people there are, the more genius we have.

Remember, we barely can absorb the energy of the sun for our own use!

The day we obsorb all incoming energy from the sun for solely our own use, is the day we destroy all other life on earth...

At the beginning of the century (20th, that is), people were already afraid of a world with 2 or 3 billion people. They predicted mass resource shortage, wars and so on. But overall we could cope, and population has been increasing steadily ever since, and we have never had so few cases of starvation as in modern times. Most people on Earth live now better than their ancestors. There is a huge amount of progress in quality of live versus one century ago, even in the developing countries.

10 billions won't be more of an issue that jumping from 1 to 3 was. It's actually a smaller increment vs where we are right now.

> and we have never had so few cases of starvation as in modern times.

Hunger kills more people than Malaria, HIV / AIDS and tuberculosis combined.

About 925 million people are hungry (that's very roughly 1 in 7 people).

Undernutrition kills 5 million children under the age of 5 each year.

(http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats)

And all that's on the decline.

Yeah, while we should check the numbers, I am pretty sure there were far more poor and starving people 100 years ago, not in total number of course, but in proportion of the actual world population. When is the last time you heard about starvation in China, for example ?

Do you realize this argument works for any X and X+k ? I assume you are not thinking that an infinite number of people would get along just fine, so clearly there are some other constraints. It may well be that those constraint kick in at a higher number than many assume, but it might as well be smaller.

I'm not sure why you seem surprised; this is a very long standing trend. It's also pretty obvious. You aren't the only one to value quality of life over quantity; in fact everyone else does too. The only problem is that if you're very poor you don't have a choice. Wherever and whenever the human race manages to claw its way out of poverty, we immediately stop having so many kids. It's not magic.

That being said...

1) What upcoming food shortage? Food production is largely a solved problem. We know how to sustainably produce large amounts of food from a given amount of arable land, and we have plenty of arable land to feed not just the current global population, but the projected maximum global population. It's true! We already have the ability to feed the largest population we'll ever have. True, Africa currently has food shortages, but as soon as Africa stops relying on peasant farming, that problem goes away. We can argue about when (or if) Africa is going to finally have their own Green Revolution[0], but...upcoming shortages? Do you know something the rest of us don't? :)

2) I might ask what upcoming resource shortage, but that's a more complicated question, and probably not worth arguing about. Still, you might want to consider the outcome of the Simon-Erlich wager[1], look at commodity price trends over the last couple decade, and then look at futures prices. Would you take Erlich's side in a repeat of the original wager? I wouldn't, and it's worth noting that Erlich and his ideological allies have repeatedly refused to do so. Again, what do you know that they don't?

3) Also, this is wonderful news for "investors" too (why beat around the bush? Call them "capitalists"; you know you want to...). Trust me, the slavering capitalist dogs are VASTLY more interested in having a rich China full of consumers than in having a poor China full of workers. It might be nice to have cheap Chinese labour making iPods to sell to 300m rich Americans, but it will be FANTASTIC to have cheap robot labour making iPods to sell to 1.3b rich Chinese. (And that's precisely the scenario you're envisioning.) Lower costs and higher sales is how capitalists make their money in the real world.

4) Finally, it remains to be seen how good it will be environmentally. In the short run (say, the next 50 years), it probably won't be. Much as with population growth, we see an inverted curve. Very poor countries can't afford to pollute, and very rich ones can afford not to - but right in the middle you end up polluting a bunch. We went through that period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; now it's China's turn. They're producing less pollution for every dollar of GDP each year, but their GDP is climbing much faster. The environment is likely to get worse before it gets better. (Of course, look on the bright side: We are conquering global inequality, and the environment will recover eventually. Those are both GREAT. But let's not get carried away.)

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

> What upcoming food shortage? Food production is largely a solved problem. We know how to sustainably produce large amounts of food from a given amount of arable land, and we have plenty of arable land to feed not just the current global population, but the projected maximum global population. It's true! We already have the ability to feed the largest population we'll ever have. True, Africa currently has food shortages, but as soon as Africa stops relying on peasant farming, that problem goes away. We can argue about when (or if) Africa is going to finally have their own Green Revolution[0], but...upcoming shortages? Do you know something the rest of us don't? :)

(I had a strong personal reaction to your tone; I find your tone really unpleasant. I recognise this is my problem. Sorry.)

You're right that there is enough food for everyone to be fed and live a productive life.[1] But there are still extensive problems sharing that food out.

Just one example: almost half of children under 5 in Nepal are stunted because of chronic malnutrition.[2]

Developing countries spend too much money importing food.[3]

There are problems now that are hard to overcome in future - climate change, desertification, salination, rates of HIV / AIDS in the farming population, migration, etc. Here's a set of photos showing some problems. (http://www.irinnews.org/photo/Slideshow/43/Too-Poor-to-Farm)

But there are interesting methods that show some promise - such as 'empowering women'.[4]

I don't think we are conquering global inequality. I think it's getting worse. And the environment might not recover eventually; it might go into runaway heating and boil off the atmosphere. Or it might recover eventually, after having killed off all human life.

[1] (http://www.wfp.org/hunger/faqs)

[2] (http://www.irinnews.org/Photo/Details/201112300839360722/A-y...)

[3] (http://www.irinnews.org/In-depth/77872/72/A-global-food-cris...)

[4] (http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95038/FOOD-Reduce-hunger-nurt...)

And the environment might not recover eventually; it might go into runaway heating and boil off the atmosphere.

Runaway heating strikes me as highly unlikely. As temperature increases, blackbody radiation increases. Since solar input is very roughly constant, eventually a new equilibrium will be found where energy lost to space once again equals energy received from the sun.

"I don't think we are conquering global inequality. I think it's getting worse."

I'm sure you think that, but the numbers are clear, and not really under any dispute. Global inequality has been falling steadily and rapidly since 1980; it's the biggest reduction in absolute poverty the world has ever seen. You can interpret those numbers however you like, but those are the numbers.

"And the environment might not recover eventually; it might go into runaway heating and boil off the atmosphere."

Not according to the IPCC and the "scientific consensus". :)

Some believe that equality means that the gap between the rich and poor is lessened, and if that was your frame of mind, then it does seem like global inequality has risen.

However, absolute poverty is decreasing just as you said, and i think that ought to be the real measure. Who cares if the richest of the rich is 100million times better off than the poorest, if the poorest is better off already?

This stuff is actually not as hard as you seem to be making it. We don't need all these "some believe" or "seem like" qualifirs.

First, what do we mean by "global inequality"? Well, let's break that down. We're talking about a metric measuring income dispersion, which is, yes, a measure of the gap between rich and poor. A common metric is the Gini Coefficient[1]. And instead of looking at the coefficient of a single country, if we look at the entire population, we get a metric of global inequality. Not hard, right?

Second, what have metrics of global inequality been doing since 1980? Why, they've been falling[2]!

So, yes, the "gap between the rich and poor [has] lessened". I have no idea why you or anyone else might think that it seems otherwise. Find an op-ed or column about the global economy from anytime in the past decade, and you've got a good chance of it either talking about how real incomes in the West (ie, the global 1%) are stagnating, or how real wages in China (ie, the global 99%) are booming. There's really no way this could happen and not result in a significant reduction in the gap between the rich and poor. And indeed, that's exactly what's resulted. (And to tie it back to a perennial HN favourite, the mechanism by which this has happened - an unprecedented reduction in global inequality and a massive reduction in absolute poverty - is exemplified by Apple and Foxconn.)

(You're also right that we could have a reduction in absolute poverty even as global inequality increased. But that's now what is happening.)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

[2]: I'm resisting supplying citations because a quick Google search will turn up, literally, pages of results. Still, if you want one image, this one[3] isn't bad.

[3]: http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/cf_images/200...

To claim that modern food production is sustainable when it is extremely dependent on cheap energy from oil seems quite a stretch stretch to me. It may work at the present oil prices but how many times can oil prices double until current practices stop working?

Note that I don't believe this will be food induced Armageddon. Rather, I expect a retooling just as big as the green revolution towards energy efficiency and energy output (as opposed to the great input that happens currently).

Simon-Erlich wager is the mother of all cherry-picks. It tracks the decline in oil prices in the 1980-1990 decade from over $110 to $30. Driven by cheap energy, commodity prices declined as well.

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical...

There are reasons to believe the era of cheap oil / energy is over, due to a combination of peak oil and the globally connected population growing from 1 billion to 3-4 billions and then some more. Think China + India joining the global economy. Indeed, the oil prices are now close to the Dec 1979 maximum. Commodity prices follow:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vsQ_G2OOspQ/S6-J-F32xaI/AAAAAAAABp...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=copper+prices+1970+2010

Your point 4 is exceedingly optimistic. The environment won't "recover". It will certainly reach a stable equilibrium, but that equilibrium may well be something we, as a species, won't particularly like or thrive in.

While we're talking arable land, we need to consider that the majority of the land that could be deployed as farmland is home to a whole host of ecosystem services and bio-resources that, if destroyed, won't be coming back. Temperatures can stabilize, pollution can go down, but if we can't stave off habitat loss and destruction, we'll be a lot worse off than today. More people means they all need somewhere to live, somewhere to grow their food, and somewhere to put their waste. That space is all at the expense of organisms we need. We can't just shrug our shoulders and assume everything will bounce back eventually.

As for the fertility implosion itself - it needs to happen, sooner or later. Those 20-year olds in the Middle East and the babies being born today? Yeah, they'll get old, too. Brooks' view on demographics is a pyramid scheme, we need to figure it out, and I'd sooner have it happen now while we still have a relative diversity of species and environments left.

The thing is quantity of life is growing where quality of life is low, and the quality of life is growing where quantity of life is low.

So it's sort of the worst of both worlds: the developed countries could afford a population growth in a humane and civilized way but they won't. Conversely, developing countries with overly high population growth become a terrible mess that they couldn't afford.

However, I also think that nature will balance itself back in a way or another. Of course, we won't be asked whether we would like to join or not, and necessarily isn't going to be a nice ride, but the tension we, as a species, are building will release at some point.

The best part of unsustainability is that it can't be sustained.

There's nothing stopping high birth rates in areas where quality of life is low - it just has to be balanced by high death rates. Suppose there's a country where it's possible to feed a million people, and there are already a million people. There is no economic growth. Suppose about a quarter of the population is women of childbearing age, and they each have a baby every five years, so each year there are 50,000 new people. That's perfectly sustainable as long as 50,000 of people die each year.

That's 1/20 of the population dying each year, so that implies high death rates and short lifespans. It would suck, but it would be sustainable. And that's pretty much how the world was for most of history.

It will be interesting to see how China's single-child-per-family experiment plays out. That decision alone might very well trigger a downfall both in economic and cultural terms.

Or they may find the technological holy grail to deal with it. I truly have my hopes on China deciding to spend their growing wealth on making the next decades better for all, rather than sinking it into non-renewable energy and consumables.

This is non issue, if needed, nation state can produce arbitrary number of children.

a nation state that can coerce its populace into having an arbitrary number of children is not one where those children would like to grow up in...

...and nation state with 90% old people is? BTW im just claiming this is not issue. if need arises for fixing this there are known solutions (it is very easy to reproduce). I dont understand this hype and urgency about aging of europe. Every once and then this headlines appears for some reason.

Please prefix the pundit neocon's name to these types of submissions.

Linking to David "Bobos" Brooks is the political equivalent of linking to goatse.

Not to pass judgement, but if Brooks ever manages to tap out anything less than utterly wrong and contemptible, I'm quite certain someone else said it first, only better.

I don't know about the rest of the people here, but I'd be interested in hearing why you think Brooks is so contemptible.

Unrepentant war monger.

If you really want to get worked up, watch one of his tete a tetes with Mark Shields on PBS (if they're still doing that). I'm surprised Brooks has the brain power to breathe.

Anyway. Is it really too much to ask submitters to prefix their links with the celebrity neocons name?

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