There's a New Country Ranking and You're Not Going to Like It | Hacker News Reader

There's a New Country Ranking and You're Not Going to Like It

atvbt.com

The reason Israel is ranked so high is actually a major problem for Israel because it indicates the growth of the "wrong demographic" which is dragging the country down.

Israel is typically a western country and as such has typical western birth rate. However, Hasidic Jews and to a lesser degree the Arab population are both expanding with 10 children per household in many cases. This in itself wouldn't be a problem but due to the closed nature of both society's (especially the Hasidic Jews), we end up with largely ignorant adults who are changing the demographic of the country.

Statistically a non-religious Israeli household contributes a large percentage of its income in terms of taxes. It serves in the Army and has a net positive impact on the economy. Hasidim specifically have the inverse impact. They take more in terms of benefits than they contribute to the economy and, due to their refusal to partake in school standardization, their children would be a major burden on society too. Their destructive impact on politics is even worse.

Everything I've ever seen says that secular Jewish birthrates in Israel are higher than W Europe/US, like

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-birth-rate-remains-hig...

Yes. But not at a scale that would make such a huge difference.

It’s growing into a similar problem as faced by nations with an inverted population pyramid and no immigration: an increasingly smaller share of workers whose productivity supports an increasingly large proportion of the economically idle.

But it happens much faster because rather than being economically idle due to having worked and contributed to society for 40-some years like those nations’ retiree seniors, Haredim move smoothly from being children drawing on societal resources to being adults drawing on societal resources with no period of usefulness in the middle. By analogy, they’re the peacock feathers of Israeli society, and how things get resolved with that will get … interesting.

Here is an example of reductionism leading to crazy results.

Nauru is 11th on that list. That country is known for 3 things: 1) 90% of the population is either overweight or obese, 2) > 50% of the population smokes, 3) in the 70’s and 80’s, > 90% of the GDP was due to phosphate mining; today, > 90% of GDP is due to refugee processing for Australia.

There’s not a single ranking that makes sense if you keep tiny countries in the list. Too many outliers.

I like it; child birth is often ignored in these rankings, but without it a society collapses. You can’t just accept more immigrants because they may not want to assimilate into the culture or be capable of taking on the jobs left by the previous generations. GNI is also a good metric, I’ll have to start using it instead of GDP per capita

That assumes that you don't take adults from countries that you destroy.

Something the US has been real good at since WII.

Incidentally if you have never wondered if ceos who have seen the wrong end of a NATO missile will particularly care if native US citizen live or die, well you probably should.

What are you talking about?

Not to sound like an Islamophobe, but outside of strict adherents to Islam, which immigrant groups don't "want" to assimilate to a sufficient degree for your tastes? I understand that much of Europe receives primarily Muslim migrants and that those immigrants can be seen as culturally incompatible. But my take is that, given the overwhelming appeal of migrating to wealthy nations, it should be possible to design system that deters the most staunchly conservative/religious migrants in favor of people more compatible with Western norms.

I'd imagine this is not done explicitly at least in part due to the Western compulsion to not appear/act in ways that are discriminatory towards religious beliefs. But as an American, I have seen too many thousands of up close examples of 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants (and beyond) who may look Filipino or Lebanese or Mexican or Pakistani but are in every way as American as the average American of Anglo/German/French/etc ancestry.

> most staunchly conservative/religious migrants in favor of

That was my first thought as well, but it turns out that an interesting quirk of being an expat in a country with a different religion is that most such groups will essentially "double down" on their own belief. Essentially back at their home country they felt comfortable with a minimal, token faith because they were immersed in it anyway, but away from it they feel their ethnic identity "under attack" and hence they cling more strongly to certain aspects of it.

There's the opposite trend too, wherein the risk-takers who are willing to uproot themselves from their traditional societies and forge new lives in a new world are not particularly devoted to tradition.

And even when they are, there's the secondary trend where their children have little connection to that old world and are enamored by the new one they've grown up in.

The big exception I see to this is among asylum groups who start new lives not for ambition or adventure or hope, but out of fear and necessity, sometimes entirely against their will.

And though my Western guilt hates to restate it, the assimilation-adverse trend seems to be strongest among strict adherents to Islam.

Not to sound like an Islamophobe…

Proceeds to sound like an Islamophobe.

I’d suggest extrapolating a bit. It’s not an issue with Muslims, it’s an issue with strict adherence to a religious code.

Visit Williamsburg in New York or rural Pennsylvania and you’ll find other religions that are painfully incapable of integrating (Orthodox Jews and the Amish, respectively).

Absolutely, and that's why I'm worried about sounding like an Islamophobe and not being one. The issue is obviously (to me) one of strict religious orthodoxy, not specific religious affiliation. The problem being that there is only a single major immigrant group with strict religious orthodoxy and it happens to be Muslim. If Amish or Mormon fundamentalists were immigrating to my country in large numbers I would have the exact same concern.

There are other large immigrant groups that arent Muslim and also have issues integrating. Also, many Muslim immigrants have varying degrees of orthodoxy.

I’d say another part of the problem lies with the fact that Europeans tend to be pretty racist and insular group (and definitely so when compared to how they envision themselves). They complain about everything from Roma to West Africans (many of whom are not Muslim) moving to their countries. Hell, the Portuguese complain about Brazilians moving to their country and stealing their language with their slang.

Of course it’s all relative. Europeans are most definitely more welcoming than say the Japanese.

Isn't disliking outsiders a bit natural, specially if you are absolutely not adopting to the culture? And is this dislikeness same as racism or are these two different behaviours?

(saying this while working as an outsider in another country where at least with coworkers I never feel like an outsider but may be that's this industry I work in)

I hold that Racism, being an 'ism is a way of looking at the world that attempts to describe why reality is the way due to Racial categories

https://medium.com/luminasticity/on-racism-6b38784a9156

>Like most systems of thought Racism draws from some common characteristic(s) found in at least part of the humanity for its power, in the case of Racism it is the tendency to xenophobia.

not liking outsiders is xenophobia, most European countries are xenophobic, but often that xenophobia gets handled, explained and solved via the tools of Racism.

Visit Williamsburg in New York or rural Pennsylvania and you’ll find other religions that are painfully incapable of integrating

Incapable, no. They simply choose not to integrate.

And to not give a fuck about what the dominant culture says about this choice.

That's actually an indictment of society, and not individuals' choices to avoid having children. If society can't manage to not exponentially explode forever, maybe it behooves us to rethink our approach to society.

> I like it; child birth is often ignored in these rankings, but without it a society collapses.

[citation needed]

So far, Japan is doing quite well. Not perfect, but not terrible either. With a contracting population.

Their middle-aged and elderly are still alive and there aren't nearly enough children to replace them. Their coming collapse is already visible when you look at an age breakdown (assuming they don't open up to immigration or have a baby boom very soon), even though the contraction in the population overall is currently small.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/

You're saying "collapse" as if it's something bad.

The thing with exponential growth, is that it has to stop at some point. The near future is not a bad time for that. There's no food insecurity, and the basic needs can be met with a small fraction of the population.

I'm sure you don't mean it this way but the "immigrants who don't assimilate" is both ahistorical and a (typically) white nativist talking point.

It's ahistorical in the sense that what population hasn't immersed after 2-3 generations? They're indistinguishable from any other American. As just one example, over half of CBP officers are Latino/Hispanic [1].

Plus, assimilate into what? Culture isn't static. What is US culture now is different than 40 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago. When people (and again, to be clear, I mean generally not you specifically) they're clinging onto a flawed picture of what culture was or should be that was never really the case or, at best, was only the case for a very narrow window.

A prime example in online spaces is fetishizing the 1950s and it's hardly ever mentioned that women couldn't get certain jobs, what jobs they could get were severely underpaid compared to their male counterparts, the idyllic life was only possible because of a permanent underclass of lowly paid workers and the top marginal tax rate was 91%.

This is a deep topic. But "culture" is often used nowadays as a more polite label for "Islamophobia" and/or "racism". I would encourage you to look at who, politically, bangs that particular drum (eg AfD in Germany, Le Pen in France) and really consider the whole platform they're pushing, who it's for and why.

[1]: https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/06/26/fact-check-are-half-o...

"I also happen to think that fertility matters, because people existing is good."

No need to worry, plenty of people exist. Every contrived "benefit" of fertility is actually a benefit of having a sufficiently large working population, not of rotely making new babies. Not mentioned in this thought exercise is the concept of immigration, the tried and true method of ensuring a sufficient working age population as famously exemplified by the greatest economy the world has ever known.

It's a particularly important distinction since those wealthy nations that manage to score well on this metric tend to skew towards theocracy. And those that do not tend to share the common characteristic of having large immigrant populations already, which fuel their higher birth rates.

I'm pretty pro-immigration, but this just delays the issue. Global fertility is trending downwards, and while the nations where immigration comes from are a few generations behind, they will get to where the nations that immigrations goes to are eventually.

It's important not to catasrophize merely by extrapolating trends. Trends rarely hold true, _especially_ when holding true would lead to catastrophe. But one of the _reasons_ why they often don't hold true is people start thinking about and planning for the catastrophe.

Merely saying "well we will just have more immigration" isn't a good enough answer. Partly because A) you can't _just_ do that. Japan has very clearly chosen not to take the immigration that it very easily could get to solve its demographic issue. The US, which is topping this metric largely thanks to immigrants and recent immigrants, is also experiencing a pretty widespread backlash against immigration right now, and it's tough to say what immigration rates will look like in the medium-to-long term.

So A) a country has to _allow_ immigration and B) even if they did, if nothing else changes that's merely a stop gap solution. Real solutions that increase fertility in groups where it has declined need to be found. They might find themselves, but I think it's safer to assume they won't.

I'm so curious to know what the optimal number of human beings is. Recall that the earth is finite, so presumably we would hit this point eventually. But for some reason, you don't seem convinced that we should ever stop.

Thinking that falling birth rates and a declining population is a bad thing is very much not the same thing as thinking that we should never stop increasing the population.

This implies that the current number is the right number then, doesn't it? If so, why?

No, it implies that the current number isn't above the maximum.

how do you calculate what the maximum is, do you have a model for it?

I see three primary approaches:

1) Massive social support for child-rearing to essentially bride people to procreate.

2) Liberal immigration policies geared towards increasing the working age population and filling in skill gaps.

3) Already being a society that is primarily oriented towards religious orthodoxy.

We've seen many nations try #1, sometimes in ways that are extraordinarily extravagant (especially by US standards of social welfare) and the results have been mild at best, if not entirely insufficient.

We've seen nations such as the US and the UK go for #2 with amazing results. And although that may not be sustainable forever it is certainly sustainable for a few more generations at the very least based on global birth rate trends.

Personally, I want nothing to do with #3 and would never want to live in such a society. I imagine large majorities in developed nations generally agree.

Option #2 still seems like the best bet.

I'm not convinced those are the only options, at least if option 1 is purely economic. I could imagine a society that is more geared toward supporting children and parents, and encouraging parenthood, in other ways. ie. 'parenting as a village' or other things along those lines. Don't know how to transform the society we have into one that looks like that though.

1 is exactly what Denmark does on many levels. From early medical to care to infra to lifestyle. Children are accepted as part of whole life, not as some bothersome nuisance that most western countries treat children as such.

There’s also 4) some sort of Handmaid’s Tale hellscape where women are essentially forced to reproduce. How long until an authoritarian country decides to try it?

> Every contrived "benefit" of fertility is actually a benefit of having a sufficiently large working population, not of rotely making new babies.

I disagree. First, people are good in and of themselves. Second, while immigration is great, the health of a culture requires some endogenous replenishment.

How does a country skew toward theocracy? There are only a handful of theocracies and most don't have notably high birthrates

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/theocracy?variant=zh-tw#Curren...

The dimensional analysis justification for squaring the TFR is a total non-sequitur (TFR is unitless, so you cannot compensate for any dimensional issue this way). [1]

Instead, let's look at the Pareto front [2]:

Liechtenstein - GNI: 116,600, TFR: 1.3 Norway - GNI: 102,460, TFR: 1.6 Ireland - GNI: 80,390, TFR: 1.7 Iceland - GNI: 79,840, TFR: 1.7 Denmark - GNI: 73,360, TFR: 1.7 Qatar - GNI: 70,070, TFR: 1.9 Israel - GNI: 55,020, TFR: 2.9 Nigeria - GNI: 4,570, TFR: 4.6 Niger - GNI: 590, TFR: 6.1

Do you think countries on the top end or the bottom end of this front are better? If your answer is top, then you probably should not take a metric that weights up entries in the bottom half too seriously. And vice versa.

[1] Whereas the author's other justification, the compounding effect, is not sensible under the author's own assumptions: "how much GNI would you trade for an additional child per woman" should not depend on the current TFR like this if the author generically values every person coming into existence as he claims.

To take into account a compounding effect, one would have to do a much more complicated analysis, and place the compounding factor on total population enabling economic specialization, the sustainability of high GNI, and the actual economic complexity of each nation, certainly not on TFR. Not that I'm going to take the author's justification seriously unless their next post advocates for buying excess children from Niger, so that they can further increase the complexity of a more prosperous economy.

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front

I know this is meant to be tounge-in-cheek and not serious, but still fun to mull over.

IMO, main issue is the assumption that GDP/capita is independent of population size.

I suspect most economies would hit a saturating point where most people are underemployed and there's no productive work left for new entrants.

While South Korea shrinking 1/4x each generation is bad, growing 4x would probably also be bad.

Seems like the best case would be hitting some optimal population size + age distribution then maintaining that each generation -- not shrinking but also not growing.

> I suspect most economies would hit a saturating point where most people are underemployed and there's no productive work left for new entrants.

I don't know if that's actually true. When you have more people, you likely need more construction to house them, and more restaurants for them to eat at, and more shops for them to shop at, etc. And more delivery drivers, etc. That's not to say a mass of people is enough to form a thriving economy... I think there does need to be some core product or service or some of the people are contributing to or a resource they're harvesting, because the economy either needs to be self sufficient or be able to exchange something of value for the inputs it needs.

It's really hard to measure, of course.

> I know this is meant to be tounge-in-cheek and not serious

I honestly can't tell if it is, or if it is satire, what it thinks the object of ridicule is.

Child birth and money are typically negatively correlated.

My gut reaction is that Israel comes out on top here, because they have an extremely religious minority that likes to have babies, but also a less religious faction that acts the same way most developed economies do (dont have as many babies but work a lot). Its kind of unusual to have both in the same country. However i think that underlines how stupid a metric this is, as that is probably bad for long term ecconomic success.

Israel's secular population by itself still makes significantly more babies (per capita) than the western world. Israelis loves their babies.

These are great factors.

Check also https://greatcountry.org (pet project od mine)

This seems flawed.

The author claims fertility is important but there's not a single mention of immigration. Why does this matter? Because it's the only thing holding up the US population growth [1].

Another issue: Israel tops this metric but its economy is in a dire state [2].

Lastly, there's no consideration here given to wealth inequality, at least not directly. It matters. South Korea has the lowest birth rate of any country in the world (~0.7 children per woman). South Korea is dying. Why? There are lots of reasons but a big one is that it's so expensive to raise children in South Korea as well as all the expectations placed on South Korean women.

You notice this with other countries that rank highly, like Qatar, which has a relatively small native population who are quite wealthy but a huge underclass of migrant labourers.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/1-source-us-population-growth...

[2]: https://theconversation.com/israel-11-months-of-war-have-bat...

Author has computed BBMI (baby baby money index) but mistakenly calls it BMI. If he divides the BBMI by the TFR, one B goes away and you get the true BMI which is a different ranking altogether. For bonus points you can compute which country has the same ranking whether BBMI or BMI.

> Japan's economy hasn't meaningfully grown in three decades, despite robust productivity growth, likely because of unfavorable demographic shifts.

This is meaningless. So what? The part of economic growth that comes from population growth isn't valuable, it basically cancels out on the most important measure which is per-capita outcomes. GDP growth is only really important as far as it is tracking meaningful per-capita changes. Otherwise it would be a reasonable indicator of who has more people but that isn't interesting except, maybe, in a war. Which we don't want.

Japan might or might not have terrible problems, but insofar as demographics aren't driving growth that isn't a problem. The problem is if productivity growth has stalled or there aren't enough resources to look after all the unproductive old people.

Humans overrun all habitats, ruining previously nice areas like California. Building more housing only exacerbates the breeding problem. For that reason, I disagree with including the fertility rate. Good for 401Ks but terrible for living, and the planet.

NIMBYism but instead of no housing they shouldn’t even be born?

I hate this shit because if it were taken seriously it will just be used to justify taking away reproductive rights in order to keep pushing these numbers up.

There are countries where both can coexist.

The childless will have to contribute more to daycare subsidies and parental leaves through taxes though.

Both of what?

Reproductive rights and high fertility.

I would love for my tax dollars to go toward childcare and parental leave, instead of the ersatz makework jobs program we commonly call "defense", but I live in the United States, where that is, apparently, just too radical. Pity.

There's tons of countries where historically "reproductive rights" have been taken away in order to reduce the birthrate including China and India at different points. Countries where "reproductive rights" have been taken away to increase the birthrate: 1. Ceausescu's Romania 2. ???

I don't know how exactly you define reproductive rights, but there are plenty of examples where politicians have tried to force women into giving birth to more children.

* Nazi Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn

* Russia is moving in that direction today https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-bans-child-free-...

* I am sure there is something behind Catholic ban on contraception that can be traced to this as well

2. Russia nowadays https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/18/russia-ban-pro...

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