Although I disagree with the malthusian view on the world I still think there is a more important quantitative argument against this viewpoint. A fertility rate significantly below 2 results in an exponential decline in the population with a lag. In other words, fertility rates close to 1 (as seen in japan and korea), result in a sharp population decline a few decades later that could destabilize the society. Even if I concede the anti-human argument I don’t think the environment would benefit from a destabilizing population collapse. A slow gradual fall with rates close but not quite 2 seems like a much better alternative.
Every time fertility decline comes up I consistently see the same arguments about why fertility is declining: people are just not comfortable enough to want to have children. I just don’t buy this.
I have seen reasons like workspace discrimination, lack of parental leave, economic uncertainty and poverty in general used as reasons why young adults are not choosing to have children and it doesn’t quite make sense to me. Objectively along all those axis, societies have improved with time from the early 1900s and the birth rate keeps falling. Can someone help me understand why European countries keep trying to increase the comfort of their population expecting to increase birth rates? I understand social programs with payouts can be popular and perhaps paying to solve the problem is appealing to the population but I don’t see why we would expect those policies to actually increase fertility. I would understand if this was simply a case of government programs that people like even if they don’t achieve the desired outcome.
I think a much simpler microeconomic analysis explains the decline in fertility: opportunity cost. People in child-bearing age have too much other stuff with a larger expected payout than having children. For example, a lot of people might prefer to work hard to improve their socioeconomic situation or travel the word over raising children. Under this model, more government provided comfort won’t increase fertility because the vast amount of costs in child bearing comes from the opportunity cost. Even in a world without parental discrimination I would find it hard to argue that parents should automatically be promoted in their work but that may actually be the more significant cost. A parent may forgo promotion or other gains for parenting.
I am not sure what a better solution this problem is. We probably need to reframe childbearing in a different way through so that having children is not subject to this type of utilitarian analysis.
Here is an example of how people in the military making policy decisions think about it[1]. This guy in particular worked as national security advisor.
My take is that it comes from nations avoiding war if they don’t think they can win anything from it. Weakness simply means you cannot stop the enemy from accomplishing their goals. Weakness is definitely not sufficient or necessary. Instead it is the perception of weakness from one party (accurate or not) that may incite violence. A better one liner would be “weakness is provocative”.
I strongly agree with your statement. Free sex and love are fine as long as there are no consequences. But sadly even with all our technology there must be consequences since we don’t know of any other way to propagate the species into the future.
For the advocates of sexual libertinism I have a question: how do you ensure male parental investment? As a society we value it and often legally demand it. I certainly could not argue for the alternative. How do you assign fathers under complete sexual liberation? A common thread is that somehow you socialize childrearing but I am seriously skeptical of the scalability of that approach beyond small tribal societies.
That’s a nice idea but how do you do credit assignment for childrearing purposes? Sadly even in modern society, sex is not entirely unliked from reproduction and we still expect, often legally demand, fathers invest resources in their children. I thought part of the deal with monogamy came from ensuring stable male parental investment and a good way to achieve this is through monogamy as a proxy for fatherhood.
My understanding is that this is largely the reality already in the dating marketplaces we can measure (dating apps). At least every study with dating app data I have seen shows a small minority of men get the vast majority of female attention.
I always see people mentioning better employment benefits and more flexibility to increase fertility in working women. Unfortunately, I think this misses a fundamental problem with working and motherhood: opportunity cost. The more driven, promising, smart and successful a woman is, the higher her opportunity cost of having children. You also have to take into account that young people are not just working for current earnings but also investing in their skills for future earnings. It would then be reasonable for young women to simply take advantage of the more relaxed work environment for further career advancement. It’s likely what explains Europe’s low birthrates despite more generous welfare policies. Eventually as people get older their career progression stabilizes and the opportunity cost falls to the point where they can afford to have children. Notice that opportunity cost is not money per say. For example poorer working class people tend to have more children, I suspect, because their opportunity cost is lower. So, in a sense, the poorer you are the more affordable children become.
I like your approach and I agree that it should lead to better outcomes. Sadly for the less socially adept, it’s not clear to me how to get social interactions from random strangers without having both sides of the equation be uncomfortable. My experience of trying this approach just ends with two uncomfortable people and leaves me with another social misstep to haunt me at night.
Since it sounds like you want to share your experience, would you mind sharing more details of how those first encounters went and why you even decided to talk to those people in the first place? Where do you hangout that you can just casually approach and start chatting up people?
An element that is often missing from the conversation is the opportunity cost of the employee. A significant portion of a worker’s compensation should to go paying his opportunity cost. I think that despite similar productivity and the recent rise in remote work, an employee’s opportunity cost is reduced if they move to a remote mountain town.
I agree with your approach to the point I think it’s the only way to really tackle loneliness and making friends. You just have to talk to strangers, often about nothing.
Unfortunately for the less socially trained, the advice in the article seems pretty daunting. It reminds me of of the quote “people won’t remember what you said but they’ll remember how you made then feel”. I am pretty sure I’ve made a few people feel awkward or mildly uncomfortable in my time trying to do this.
Naturally, I’ve gotten better but since it’s not something I do frequently I’m still pretty bad at it. I really wish there were a systematic way to train talking to strangers in an environment where it’s ok to make minor social missteps. Unfortunately it seems to me that such an environment is some stage of development that I missed at an earlier age. Is there some way forward that doesn’t just involve eating the losses as a cost of learning?
1. I doubt we have the technology to automate deer hunting yet; however, it would be very useful to have drones hunt the deer and have humans pickup the spoils. I did say it would be great if we could buy hunted deer as long as it’s tested for the nasty pathogens wildlife tends to have.
2.Having humans hunt the deer is preferable because they obey laws, don’t scare people, wont eat the farmer’s animals and, again, we also get to keep the meat.
I frankly don’t understand why we would want to reintroduce a predator like this. From the article it seems the only benefit they bring is to control deer populations at the expense of farmers and causing discomfort to the general population. Instead of having wolves why not simply have humans hunt the excess deer? If you can test the game for undesirable pathogens it could even be a good business opportunity. Ultimately humans are always in control of the environment even if we choose to do nothing. Our technology and resources are too great to claim we have “unmanaged wilderness”.
I also forgot to mention the insane amount of resources wasted lobbying to complicate the tax code so every company and sector gets their loophole. This doesn’t just have the same human capital cost but it also gnaws at the trust people have in the democratic system. It’s a lot harder for Bezos or Cook to lobby for an individual tax cut than it is for Amazon and Apple.
I still don’t understand corporate income taxes. These are just pass through entities. All the money goes to actual people which are a lot easier to tax than a corporation. I think it’s such a waste of human capital having corporations incentivized to spend on armies of lawyers and accountants trying to come up with some baroque legal construction to avoid taxes. Maybe I am ignorant about tax law but people seem a lot harder to “invert” to cheaper tax jurisdictions no matter how rich they are.
I would even go as far as saying that payroll taxes are the same. Taxes hidden from the general public with weird incentives that break stuff in unexpected ways. We would be better served with more income, property or sales/vat taxes.
I mean disposable plastic bags benefit the poor more than they hurt the rich. For example, perhaps the poor use those plastic bags as trash bags for other waste instead of buying proper trash bags. I know I often did.
I find there is a worrying lack of thorough quantitative analysis with these types of bans and attempts to internalize externalities. This law is a statement by lawmakers predicated on the cost of single use plastic bags and even paper bags to be greater than the efficiencies they introduce to society at large. It seems to me that such a statement is extremely hard to quantify. Furthermore this may also be a regressive tax where poor people disproportionately benefit from the benefits provided by single use plastic bags and the rich pay more of the consequences. This is without even taking into account the unintended consequences of such laws. Another poster even mentioned the health hazards that could be introduced.
I think the government can definitely fund certian types of research but in most developed countries the private sector commands so much more wealth that it would be a waste not to allow companies to develop drugs for profit. I would rather have expensive drugs than no drug at all. This isn’t even an argument about government efficiency but rather about the relative size of what can be done when the private sector is much larger than the government.
This sentiment I don’t understand. What’s the problem with aggregating most of the population in a few urban centers? It makes sense to me from an economic point of view where the productivity of clusters benefits greatly from density. It also makes sense from an environmental perspective because it reduces sprawl and using elevators instead of cars should significantly lower carbon emissions. More importantly, unlike other environmentally friendly policies, like carbon taxes or not eating beef, people actually want to move to the more successful cities. Although every individual is familiar with the downsides of cities the economies seem to be large enough to overcome them.
It’s also probably explained by the increase in single motherhood [1]. I suspect since women no longer need men for financial sustenance they can pick any father they want and raise the child alone if need be. Since attractiveness in men is pareto distributed it probably translates to single mothers and throwaway men.
I was really talking about the type of poor man that ends up in gangs im places like Chicago. I remember a podcast that talked how even pretty heavily punished violent crimes like murder actually helped some of these men gain social status(I can’t quite find the reference right now).
Part of my argument is that in the right circumstances the partially sexually mediated drive for status in males turns violent. It seems like things like marriage and monogamy restrain this impulse and we all benefit from it.
Notice that I really don’t see marriage or monogamy as centrally enforced but rather as an emergent pattern of behavior that has been adopted by most societies and then codified into law. I presume it was this widely adopted because the individuals doing the marrying believed it was the best option at the time.
Overall I would say that although the institution has to evolve to accomodate women’s control over their reproduction and the vast economic potential women have to offer, we are probably not so special and different now that we ought do away with it.
Regarding your point about aging, I actually think that should take a back seat to the wellbeing of children. It still seems to me like monogamy and marriage are the best vehicles we have today for raising them. Even if polyamory could potentially provide some benefits to the parents, I think those are the type of sacrifices that people gladly do for the well-being of their children.
I think he is implying they dont work well for low-status males. Males in particular are known for getting violent in desperate efforts to accrue the status necessary to secure a mate. It’s not like marriage is perfect because some low-status males will always fail to find a partner but if you make that a significant percentage of the population I would expect society to destabilize.
On the other side of the polyamory issue, I am not sure the weakening of marriage is all that good. Single parenthood doesn’t seem to be that good for the children and I also dont see how polyamory solves the issues of paternal responsability. I would also argue for caution when messing with an institution that has been established on every successful civilization. Polyamory also seems to ignore certian aspects of human sexual competition that aren’t really compatible with civilization. I am not saying marriage is a panacea but it seems to be a reasonable compromise to channel human sexuality for the good of society.
One problem I have noticed in the field is that many existing professors are operating at a reduced capacity because of the incentives to work in industry (consulting etc) and do startups. Many end-up taking many less phd students than they could otherwise because of this. What the article mentions sounds like a problem that will fix itself.
I love dropbox but one of their biggest problems is their refusal to support more than 300,000 files in their sync clients. I have considered moving to google but I need local copies since I often don’t have internet connection but I still need my files. Either way, they have a useful product even if they won’t dominate the enterprise or consumer market.
I am very curious to see what this will do to Chinese style capital controls. They probably have started cracking down on exchanges but even with an outright ban it sounds like a more powerful method to get money of of the country.
Seeing young americans accept communism is terrifying to me. They are showing the same level of historical ignorance that Bernie Sanders showed when he claimed the american dream was more alive in plces like Venezuela.
It really sounds like young Americans haven’t seen enough of history not to take the fruits of capitalism for granted. It’s like they have forgotten how bad things can get if you let political ideologies like communism run amok. It’s even alive here on HN with a commenter claiming the life of a Japanese Salaryman is somehow equivalent to a communist distopia.
You really need to be judicious when deciding to change a system that works as well as the US does for its people. There are plenty of injustices and grievances that we must address but It’s truly hartbreaking seeing young amricans turning on the ideals that made America into the great country it is today.
I was reading other commenters mentioning the relatively old age of farmers. Maybe the only good option would be something like removing/phasing out existing subsidies so that only right amount of young people choose the profession coupled with a generous retirement program. Something like social security plus but with your farmland backing the plus part. Maybe in the spirit of what you’re describing. I worry about the unforseeable consequences of paying to leave arable land fallow. You’re essentially raising food prices and that really affects poor people the most.
There are few places where market forces work as well as in farming. Which is surprising considering the distortions imposed by subsidies. Still, I think this is a case where automation will eliminate many if not all of their jobs and the market is doing a good job at signaling that they probably need to change professions. This especially rang true when they mentioned how the price of a wheat bushel appeared to below production costs. It’s really pains me to see these men having to deal with the dark side of creative distruction but I also don’t know what’s the best way to help them reinvent themselves for the future.
I am not even sure they are learning much faster than the Japanese during their period of growth. Their progress definitely looks very Japan circa 1980’s to me.
Either way the massive debts in their financial system seem like a test of the limits of Keynesian and Monetarists theories. With their absolute control of money supply they can increase it at will to compensate for a decline in consumption. As far as I can see only inflation limits a government’s ability to print money. China isn’t quite at the same level as Japan, the US and Europe in terms of having crossed that weird post-inflation threshold where central banks literally print trillions and still fail to meet their inflation targets. It might turn into a Venezuela but the interesting things happen if it doesn’t. What happens to the economy when the government prints huge amounts of money but still fails to produce growth or inflation? What does that economy looks like? Moreover why doesn’t printing money cause inflation in the same way it did before?
That’s one explanation but if one company has the resources to innovate and keep up quality control it’s Apple. Especially since they have such a limited number of device models to support. I just hope this is a bad year and not an inflection point.