Since we’ve both been writing a lot about the topic recently, Robin Hanson invited me to sit down and chat with him about the global fertility decline and prospects for depopulation.
Could you point me to an article about *why* declining population is a problem? I don't necessarily disagree with you. I just don't have enough information to form an opinion yet.
But to sum up, pension systems and healthcare systems are quickly going bankrupt trying to care for a larger number (and larger proportion) of elderly. Taxes must be raised on the young, which further drives down fertility by burdening them.
A shrinking workforce and population depresses demand for goods and services. Many goods today, from cars to phones, require high capital investment that needs to be earned back through high sales volumes. If the demand is shrinking, there is less and less incentive to innovate and produce new, better things.
Innovation is also imperiled. Younger people tend to have more "fluid intelligence" while older people tend to excel in "crystallized intelligence." With too little of the former, we risk having fewer technological breakthroughs, the kind needed to address problems like climate change or other societal challengers.
As Brink notes also, there is a political element that seems to be at play in smaller rural towns. As they depopulate and economies depress, locals in these towns appear to be supporting increasingly authoritarian and radical politics. Though there is probably more varibles here.
The fact is, we don't know what happens when the global population shrinks, but most modelling sees it as a future of stagnate growth and slow (if any) innovation and progress. In a world without a growing pie (so to speak), the zero-sum nature of humans returns, and so too do our worst demons. This is the pessimist view, anyway.
From the luxurious perspective of having only three financially secure decades left to live at most, I don’t have a problem with the cyclical return of “our worst demons.” Perhaps our four-score and ten life span is a blessing: no one has to put up with misery longer than that, and most people manage to find at least some joy here and there.
In my local world, both temporally and spatially, I am strongly motivated to promote the flourishing of my neighbors as understood by the golden rule and have always devoted my time and money to this.
But I hold in tension the contradictory notion that the human species has gone too far in wresting the world’s resources for its exclusive use. Perhaps the suffering of human populations is more meaningful than the suffering of animals because we possess self-reflection. Nevertheless, life has always been mostly a matter of luck for all living creatures. The worst demons will always come for some populations and not for others. Ultimately I find more, well, serenity, in the acceptance that trying to control these things might be worse in the long run. In many ecological habitats, the bad times are necessary to restore overall balance and flourishing for subsequent generations.
Perhaps I need to bolster my arguments by delving into biological science to find instances of other species overrunning their environments and declining on a cyclical basis. I know this happens in the natural world due to fluctuations in food supply or epidemics (which can spread more quickly in dense populations.) The old “game of life” that used to be a Coding-101 assignment with little X’s displaying in rows in the green on black DOS environment comes to mind - I think I did mine in Pascal.
From the ethical standpoint it seems hubristic for homo sapiens to continue to do whatever it can to resist cycles in its global population and seek unending increase in well-being at the expense of the rest of life on our planet.
But going back to the local perspective: a bit of redistribution will bring Social Security back into balance. While there may be fewer younger people, there’s still enough wealth and income inequality out there to fix that, at any rate. (My accountant says Congress is down to two or three years to finally address this. Hopefully the authoritarian small towns will find the prospect of a 30% decrease to their payments sufficient motivation to get this passed, at any rate. In the meantime, they’ll probably have to put up with recent immigrants taking care of them in their old age - immigrants who ironically share their values.)
When considering the long-term future, I have two strong intuitions. First, there is definitely some limit to how many people can live well on an ecologically healthy planet. But second, if humanity stops growing and expanding, it will inevitably turn inward and stagnate. So I can't escape the conclusion that humanity's destiny is to expand into the cosmos.
Regarding the thesis that "innovation is imperiled", I'm unconvinced by the research to date. Major innovation isn't spread evenly over all humanity; it is concentrated in certain groups of people, in certain locations. As Brink points out, these pockets of urban innovation (like Tokyo) may very well continue to grow, even as their countries and the overall world population recedes.
Likewise, demand for innovation isn't uniform and proportional to population. Overall population may decline, but if the population of middle-class people increases (as is very likely to happen in Africa) then the market for innovative products may continue to increase.
And of course, depopulation itself will create new problems that will call for innovation. Fields like AI, medical robotics, and mobility solutions for elderly people will see a lot of investment. "Necessity is the mother of invention"
Related would the ossification of culture (movies, books, fashion, art) and the overwhelming dominance of nostalgia as a driving force in culture.
Also related, the old maxim about science advancing one funeral at a time means even more a slow down in science as there are ever fewer new guard to clash against the old guard.
Instinctively, I feel like a lot of these problems are either:
1) temporary - for example, I'm sure we can figure out the pensions thing and I expect we'll come up with a good care-for-old-people system with technology.
2) related to our economic system — maybe a capitalism that depends on a growing population will become obsolete and we'll figure out something more appropriate for a shrinking population.
I'm aware that I sound like those people who say climate change is not a problem because we'll figure something out with technology but… that's my first reaction. It worked for Malthusian problems once already.
Overall, I think the problems with a growing population are so severe that a bit of shrinkage might do us some good. Pollution, chopping down rainforests and killing all the wildlife might get a break at least. Maybe the fish stocks will grow back. Maybe we'll settle at around one billion and, by then, our social priorities will have changed.
I expect this to become my obsession over the next few months! Thanks for planting a seed.
So glad to hear! I am a bit of a pessimist on this issue but maybe I am wrong. There is a good chance that AI could drive innovation as our population shrinks. Instead of a destitute world, it could still be a prosperous one, albeit where there are fewer people, almost all of whom live in cities, while most of the world has returned to nature.
Ditto. I can see potential problems that come with a declining population, but would like to see an explanation for why it's generally a problem beyond that.
I keep coming back to what I regard as the central stylized facts of the modern fertility predicament, as summarized from what I understand of Lyman Stone and his collaborators' research (please correct me if any of this summary is inaccurate!):
1. People's average sincerely desired number of kids is plenty to sustain the population, if only they could realize that desire. The dominant (not the only) reason for societal TFR << 2 is a big gap between sincerely desired fertility and realized fertility. That's *not* the dominant reason for TFR 2 vs 4+, which is more about secularization, female emancipation, decreased infant mortality, etc. But those really are, as you say, two different demographic transitions.
2. The dominant (again, not the only) reason for the desired/realized gap is failure to form the kinds of partnerships that make people feel safe and well-supported having the number of kids they sincerely want. That's why TFR is near/above replacement *among married couples* even in the lowest-fertility societies.
Of course people have all kinds of explanations for why that failure to form partnerships happens. Still, at least realizing the above facts narrows down the problem a lot. And it points the way to a solution strategy we should welcome as fully compatible with modern liberal values, since
(a) people getting the big things they want in life is good, and kids are a thing people still want a lot
(b) people being able to form stable, committed, loving partnerships is also really good for their flourishing in ways that go beyond fertility.
The other day in the New Yorker there was a memoir piece by Leslie Jamison that I think illustrates many aspects of the problem at once:
The experience Jamison describes is truly awful (and beautifully described-- well worth reading just as a great personal essay) and I would wager that to the extent modern Western educated women feel unable to have the kids they want, it's in large part because they fear *ending up like her*. And if you think about the Amish or other trad societies, there are a bunch of reasons why women in those societies very rarely have to fear that kind of an experience:
-- there is very little loneliness in those societies; they are famously tight-knit socially and their marriage-making institutions work.
-- the burden of childcare is traditionally spread among the women in the extended family, which for all its faults, does spread out the burden and reduce the maximum intensity of burden on any one person-- and it's that maximum intensity which can get really overwhelming and scary, as any parent of an infant knows.
-- they also tend not to have the cultural expectations around intensive parenting which further increase that maximum intensity of burden for minimal demonstrable benefit to the kids.
There's a whole portfolio of things we could do to give non-Amish prospective mothers more of those benefits: technological, institutional, cultural, economic. Figuring out the highest-ROI, least-coercive ways to do that seems like a more constructive conversation topic than most of the handwringing and culture-scolding that are currently so prominent whenever fertility comes up.
I'm familiar with the point about the desired number of children, and I derive some comfort from it, but I'm not sure how heavily to rely on it. Maybe people just say what they think sounds nice but aren't really expressing deeply considered views.
> People's average sincerely desired number of kids is plenty to sustain the population
Is this true? My understanding is that people CLAIM to want more kids but can't because of money. But the limited research on exogenous financial gains (e.g. winning a lottery) shows that most people don't, in fact, go on to have more kids when those financial pressures are relaxed and that the claims are more signalling (or perhaps rooted in a kind of nostalgia, "my mom had 4, so I want to have 4") than sincere.
I think the fertility rate of billionaires (clearly not constrained child care costs) is also below the replacement rate. Case in point: Warren Buffet had 3 children. But his children have: 2, 1, and 2 children themselves, well below replacement levels.
Your comment finally prompted me to read (fine, skim) that article. I have to say I found it somewhat frustrating. Her husband C is mostly a cipher. She briefly mentions that they're both doing a lot, but it's hard to tell from the piece what if anything he was doing. She takes her baby on 30-40 flights the first year?!? I wish there had been some insight beyond the ideas that being married and having babies can be quite hard, which I think is pretty well-trodden ground. And it can be harder if you make it harder.
I've always wondered what the dating/marriage market is like for alt-right men and super-woke women. It can't be great.
The US isn't in as bad a position as South Korea but the growing gender gap in party affiliation, combined with Americans' increasing tendency to make politics central to their personal relationships, suggests things are moving in that direction. And I think it may be worse in parts of Europe, where the age gap in left/right identification is weaker (or nonexistent) and many young men are gravitating toward parties on the far right.
You saw this in the latest Polish election, for example. Look at the youthful skew among supporters of Confederation, who are overwhelmingly male:
Opinion polls also found that a plurality of young Polish women identified "climate change" as the most serious problem facing the country, while a plurality of young Polish men chose "LGBT". I can't find the citation for this one but it's terribly embarrassing.
The gender gap in France seems to be smaller than in Poland but it's notable that in the first round Eric Zemmour, who ran to Le Pen's right, won 9 percent of men's votes but just 5 percent of women's.
It seems like educating women is one of those things that is good for individual women but bad for society as a whole. I forget where I read it, but "no nation has succeeded in educating its women without also getting on a path to extinction".
I generally assume everything is largely genetic so women's hypergamy is genetic not cultural. So if we educate women to a high standard (and Korea has the most PhDs per capita of any country, and women get more of them than men) we need more men educated to an even higher standard, and that is not happening.
I'm curious what your quote might refer to. I'm not aware of any nations that succeeded in educating women equally with men until the 20th/21st centuries, and so far those that have done the best at it, like the US, have prospered greatly.
Now we just need to figure out how to make more men reasonable mates for highly educated women, and then we'll be all set.
Yes, and every nation had above replacement fertility before the 20th century. The US prospers due to a lot of immigration, the people already here have below replacement fertility, and the college educated women in particular.
As a man in his 70s something always strikes me as odd when I read journalism about fertility decline. When us baby boomers were young there were 3 billion people on the planet and now there are 8 billion. If anyone had any idea of this impending population explosion in the 60s they would have been staggered - and horrified. It would have sounded apocalyptic but 21st c. fertility agonising appears not to consider this near tripling of the earth's population something even worth mentioning. Yes I do understand that the mass starvation fears did not materialise (and Yes quite the reverse) but there may have been other downsides to the population explosion that should at least get discussed.
Why wouldn’t traditional supply and demand forces apply? For example, as children become more scarce, wouldn’t having them become more valuable and then drive the fertility trend in the opposite direction?
When population is falling and the economy is consequently shrinking, there's less demand for labor over time. I don't think there's any reason to expect soaring wages on an emptying planet. Meanwhile, even if grown kids do reap market rewards from labor shortages, how does that incentivize their parents to have them a quarter-century earlier? For the parents it's still all cost, no economic benefit. I don't see any reliable equilibrating mechanism.
Any evidence that increasing support (economic and cultural) for, single mothers by choice would be a viable strategy to mitigate declining fertility rates?
There is lots of evidence that it doesn't work. That's Hanson's point above.
Maybe it would work if societies (not just the US but everywhere) were willing to give parents $500,000-$1,000,000 in subsidies but even Scandinavia isn't willing to do that.
Hi Brink,
Could you point me to an article about *why* declining population is a problem? I don't necessarily disagree with you. I just don't have enough information to form an opinion yet.
Thanks!
I did a write up on this here: https://www.lianeon.org/p/we-dont-have-enough-people , but Brink has said it better in a few of his writings.
But to sum up, pension systems and healthcare systems are quickly going bankrupt trying to care for a larger number (and larger proportion) of elderly. Taxes must be raised on the young, which further drives down fertility by burdening them.
A shrinking workforce and population depresses demand for goods and services. Many goods today, from cars to phones, require high capital investment that needs to be earned back through high sales volumes. If the demand is shrinking, there is less and less incentive to innovate and produce new, better things.
Innovation is also imperiled. Younger people tend to have more "fluid intelligence" while older people tend to excel in "crystallized intelligence." With too little of the former, we risk having fewer technological breakthroughs, the kind needed to address problems like climate change or other societal challengers.
As Brink notes also, there is a political element that seems to be at play in smaller rural towns. As they depopulate and economies depress, locals in these towns appear to be supporting increasingly authoritarian and radical politics. Though there is probably more varibles here.
The fact is, we don't know what happens when the global population shrinks, but most modelling sees it as a future of stagnate growth and slow (if any) innovation and progress. In a world without a growing pie (so to speak), the zero-sum nature of humans returns, and so too do our worst demons. This is the pessimist view, anyway.
From the luxurious perspective of having only three financially secure decades left to live at most, I don’t have a problem with the cyclical return of “our worst demons.” Perhaps our four-score and ten life span is a blessing: no one has to put up with misery longer than that, and most people manage to find at least some joy here and there.
In my local world, both temporally and spatially, I am strongly motivated to promote the flourishing of my neighbors as understood by the golden rule and have always devoted my time and money to this.
But I hold in tension the contradictory notion that the human species has gone too far in wresting the world’s resources for its exclusive use. Perhaps the suffering of human populations is more meaningful than the suffering of animals because we possess self-reflection. Nevertheless, life has always been mostly a matter of luck for all living creatures. The worst demons will always come for some populations and not for others. Ultimately I find more, well, serenity, in the acceptance that trying to control these things might be worse in the long run. In many ecological habitats, the bad times are necessary to restore overall balance and flourishing for subsequent generations.
Perhaps I need to bolster my arguments by delving into biological science to find instances of other species overrunning their environments and declining on a cyclical basis. I know this happens in the natural world due to fluctuations in food supply or epidemics (which can spread more quickly in dense populations.) The old “game of life” that used to be a Coding-101 assignment with little X’s displaying in rows in the green on black DOS environment comes to mind - I think I did mine in Pascal.
From the ethical standpoint it seems hubristic for homo sapiens to continue to do whatever it can to resist cycles in its global population and seek unending increase in well-being at the expense of the rest of life on our planet.
But going back to the local perspective: a bit of redistribution will bring Social Security back into balance. While there may be fewer younger people, there’s still enough wealth and income inequality out there to fix that, at any rate. (My accountant says Congress is down to two or three years to finally address this. Hopefully the authoritarian small towns will find the prospect of a 30% decrease to their payments sufficient motivation to get this passed, at any rate. In the meantime, they’ll probably have to put up with recent immigrants taking care of them in their old age - immigrants who ironically share their values.)
When considering the long-term future, I have two strong intuitions. First, there is definitely some limit to how many people can live well on an ecologically healthy planet. But second, if humanity stops growing and expanding, it will inevitably turn inward and stagnate. So I can't escape the conclusion that humanity's destiny is to expand into the cosmos.
Regarding the thesis that "innovation is imperiled", I'm unconvinced by the research to date. Major innovation isn't spread evenly over all humanity; it is concentrated in certain groups of people, in certain locations. As Brink points out, these pockets of urban innovation (like Tokyo) may very well continue to grow, even as their countries and the overall world population recedes.
Likewise, demand for innovation isn't uniform and proportional to population. Overall population may decline, but if the population of middle-class people increases (as is very likely to happen in Africa) then the market for innovative products may continue to increase.
And of course, depopulation itself will create new problems that will call for innovation. Fields like AI, medical robotics, and mobility solutions for elderly people will see a lot of investment. "Necessity is the mother of invention"
All good points. Probably something we will have to "wait and see" how it ultimately plays out.
> Innovation is also imperiled.
Related would the ossification of culture (movies, books, fashion, art) and the overwhelming dominance of nostalgia as a driving force in culture.
Also related, the old maxim about science advancing one funeral at a time means even more a slow down in science as there are ever fewer new guard to clash against the old guard.
Great point and I agree. Hollywood seems to have become dominated by nostalgia driven-fan fiction lately.
Great article. Thank you. I subscribed to you.
Instinctively, I feel like a lot of these problems are either:
1) temporary - for example, I'm sure we can figure out the pensions thing and I expect we'll come up with a good care-for-old-people system with technology.
2) related to our economic system — maybe a capitalism that depends on a growing population will become obsolete and we'll figure out something more appropriate for a shrinking population.
I'm aware that I sound like those people who say climate change is not a problem because we'll figure something out with technology but… that's my first reaction. It worked for Malthusian problems once already.
Overall, I think the problems with a growing population are so severe that a bit of shrinkage might do us some good. Pollution, chopping down rainforests and killing all the wildlife might get a break at least. Maybe the fish stocks will grow back. Maybe we'll settle at around one billion and, by then, our social priorities will have changed.
I expect this to become my obsession over the next few months! Thanks for planting a seed.
So glad to hear! I am a bit of a pessimist on this issue but maybe I am wrong. There is a good chance that AI could drive innovation as our population shrinks. Instead of a destitute world, it could still be a prosperous one, albeit where there are fewer people, almost all of whom live in cities, while most of the world has returned to nature.
I'm a complete pessimist about AI! On shrinking population, it's not obvious to me that it will be bad.
Ditto. I can see potential problems that come with a declining population, but would like to see an explanation for why it's generally a problem beyond that.
I keep coming back to what I regard as the central stylized facts of the modern fertility predicament, as summarized from what I understand of Lyman Stone and his collaborators' research (please correct me if any of this summary is inaccurate!):
1. People's average sincerely desired number of kids is plenty to sustain the population, if only they could realize that desire. The dominant (not the only) reason for societal TFR << 2 is a big gap between sincerely desired fertility and realized fertility. That's *not* the dominant reason for TFR 2 vs 4+, which is more about secularization, female emancipation, decreased infant mortality, etc. But those really are, as you say, two different demographic transitions.
2. The dominant (again, not the only) reason for the desired/realized gap is failure to form the kinds of partnerships that make people feel safe and well-supported having the number of kids they sincerely want. That's why TFR is near/above replacement *among married couples* even in the lowest-fertility societies.
Of course people have all kinds of explanations for why that failure to form partnerships happens. Still, at least realizing the above facts narrows down the problem a lot. And it points the way to a solution strategy we should welcome as fully compatible with modern liberal values, since
(a) people getting the big things they want in life is good, and kids are a thing people still want a lot
(b) people being able to form stable, committed, loving partnerships is also really good for their flourishing in ways that go beyond fertility.
The other day in the New Yorker there was a memoir piece by Leslie Jamison that I think illustrates many aspects of the problem at once:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/22/the-birth-of-my-daughter-the-death-of-my-marriage
The experience Jamison describes is truly awful (and beautifully described-- well worth reading just as a great personal essay) and I would wager that to the extent modern Western educated women feel unable to have the kids they want, it's in large part because they fear *ending up like her*. And if you think about the Amish or other trad societies, there are a bunch of reasons why women in those societies very rarely have to fear that kind of an experience:
-- there is very little loneliness in those societies; they are famously tight-knit socially and their marriage-making institutions work.
-- the burden of childcare is traditionally spread among the women in the extended family, which for all its faults, does spread out the burden and reduce the maximum intensity of burden on any one person-- and it's that maximum intensity which can get really overwhelming and scary, as any parent of an infant knows.
-- they also tend not to have the cultural expectations around intensive parenting which further increase that maximum intensity of burden for minimal demonstrable benefit to the kids.
There's a whole portfolio of things we could do to give non-Amish prospective mothers more of those benefits: technological, institutional, cultural, economic. Figuring out the highest-ROI, least-coercive ways to do that seems like a more constructive conversation topic than most of the handwringing and culture-scolding that are currently so prominent whenever fertility comes up.
I'm familiar with the point about the desired number of children, and I derive some comfort from it, but I'm not sure how heavily to rely on it. Maybe people just say what they think sounds nice but aren't really expressing deeply considered views.
> People's average sincerely desired number of kids is plenty to sustain the population
Is this true? My understanding is that people CLAIM to want more kids but can't because of money. But the limited research on exogenous financial gains (e.g. winning a lottery) shows that most people don't, in fact, go on to have more kids when those financial pressures are relaxed and that the claims are more signalling (or perhaps rooted in a kind of nostalgia, "my mom had 4, so I want to have 4") than sincere.
I think the fertility rate of billionaires (clearly not constrained child care costs) is also below the replacement rate. Case in point: Warren Buffet had 3 children. But his children have: 2, 1, and 2 children themselves, well below replacement levels.
Your comment finally prompted me to read (fine, skim) that article. I have to say I found it somewhat frustrating. Her husband C is mostly a cipher. She briefly mentions that they're both doing a lot, but it's hard to tell from the piece what if anything he was doing. She takes her baby on 30-40 flights the first year?!? I wish there had been some insight beyond the ideas that being married and having babies can be quite hard, which I think is pretty well-trodden ground. And it can be harder if you make it harder.
I've always wondered what the dating/marriage market is like for alt-right men and super-woke women. It can't be great.
The US isn't in as bad a position as South Korea but the growing gender gap in party affiliation, combined with Americans' increasing tendency to make politics central to their personal relationships, suggests things are moving in that direction. And I think it may be worse in parts of Europe, where the age gap in left/right identification is weaker (or nonexistent) and many young men are gravitating toward parties on the far right.
You saw this in the latest Polish election, for example. Look at the youthful skew among supporters of Confederation, who are overwhelmingly male:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Polish_parliamentary_election#Electorate_demographics
Opinion polls also found that a plurality of young Polish women identified "climate change" as the most serious problem facing the country, while a plurality of young Polish men chose "LGBT". I can't find the citation for this one but it's terribly embarrassing.
The same thing happened in the last French presidential race, where Macron relied on older voters to defeat Le Pen in the runoff: https://www.politico.eu/article/macrons-france-vs-le-pens-france-in-charts/
The gender gap in France seems to be smaller than in Poland but it's notable that in the first round Eric Zemmour, who ran to Le Pen's right, won 9 percent of men's votes but just 5 percent of women's.
This all looks very discouraging.
It seems like educating women is one of those things that is good for individual women but bad for society as a whole. I forget where I read it, but "no nation has succeeded in educating its women without also getting on a path to extinction".
I generally assume everything is largely genetic so women's hypergamy is genetic not cultural. So if we educate women to a high standard (and Korea has the most PhDs per capita of any country, and women get more of them than men) we need more men educated to an even higher standard, and that is not happening.
I'm curious what your quote might refer to. I'm not aware of any nations that succeeded in educating women equally with men until the 20th/21st centuries, and so far those that have done the best at it, like the US, have prospered greatly.
Now we just need to figure out how to make more men reasonable mates for highly educated women, and then we'll be all set.
Yes, and every nation had above replacement fertility before the 20th century. The US prospers due to a lot of immigration, the people already here have below replacement fertility, and the college educated women in particular.
As a man in his 70s something always strikes me as odd when I read journalism about fertility decline. When us baby boomers were young there were 3 billion people on the planet and now there are 8 billion. If anyone had any idea of this impending population explosion in the 60s they would have been staggered - and horrified. It would have sounded apocalyptic but 21st c. fertility agonising appears not to consider this near tripling of the earth's population something even worth mentioning. Yes I do understand that the mass starvation fears did not materialise (and Yes quite the reverse) but there may have been other downsides to the population explosion that should at least get discussed.
Why wouldn’t traditional supply and demand forces apply? For example, as children become more scarce, wouldn’t having them become more valuable and then drive the fertility trend in the opposite direction?
When population is falling and the economy is consequently shrinking, there's less demand for labor over time. I don't think there's any reason to expect soaring wages on an emptying planet. Meanwhile, even if grown kids do reap market rewards from labor shortages, how does that incentivize their parents to have them a quarter-century earlier? For the parents it's still all cost, no economic benefit. I don't see any reliable equilibrating mechanism.
What does "become more valuable" mean here? Cash transfers from a child to their parents?
Any evidence that increasing support (economic and cultural) for, single mothers by choice would be a viable strategy to mitigate declining fertility rates?
There is lots of evidence that it doesn't work. That's Hanson's point above.
Maybe it would work if societies (not just the US but everywhere) were willing to give parents $500,000-$1,000,000 in subsidies but even Scandinavia isn't willing to do that.
This is fascinating and the opposite of what I would hold in terms of causality.
I have a hard time accepting that falling fertility rates, the likes of which we are currently witnessing, have happened before in human history.
Interesting thesis, nonetheless.