Thanks for reading The Permanent Problem! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. When I was a kid, fear of overpopulation was all the rage. Paul Ehrlich’s doomsaying The Population Bomb sold millions — I remember encountering it regularly during my endless boyhood bookstore browsing, just down the shelf from
I think that fertility rates could be improved, but it would require more than fiddling.
Just ask yourself if you would have more children if the child tax credit were $20,000 a year instead of $2,000. The answer is obviously yes is it not. And honestly we could afford it.
I think the real problem is we just aren't willing to spend the resources. Kids can't vote, and parents don't get votes for their kids. The childless want to free ride on the child bearers, because they can.
> The economic incentives to have more children (to help out on the farm, to take care of you in your old age, to “hoard” children against the distinct possibility that some of them will die) steadily diminished
I think it's more plausible that this is a matter of status. Having a large number of kids might give you status among the Satmar Hasidim, but not among most Americans.
No where in your article did I ever see it mention that having children is WORK. Necessary work, vital work, and sometimes even rewarding work, but still a massive huge gigantic amount WORK. Someone needs to be taking care, in some manner, of a child pretty much 24/7 for at least the first seven years. After that it's less work but still a gigantic amount of parent's "free time" is spent doing childcare, childcare that if they didn't want to do it they would have to pay someone else to do it, so they are working. Now, is it generally easier to get humans to do voluntary unpaid work or is it generally easier to have them decline to do extra unpaid work? The question answers itself.
Once again, thank-you Brink. I have been looking for a thoughtful review of the status and possible impacts of birth rate declines and you delivered, once again. And once again, I have a contrarian view. To start, if the impact of Covid on birth rates holds up, many are predicting population will top out at 9 Billion or so rather than 11 or 12 Billion and in my mind, this might be very good news, rather than a crisis.
The challenge, in my mind, is to solve the problem of quality of life ("peace and prosperity?") for 10 Billion people rather than how to shore up or re-start the growth engines of the last 300 years. This means, for starters, focusing the creative effort of the human endeavor on increased sustainability and quality of life, rather than traditional measures of growth. This includes providing sufficient incentives for continued progress and the freedom for all to make their contribution. Humans are problem solving animals and these challenges should provide plenty of problems to solve for the indefinite future.
I disagree that the issue is the gross number of innovations and reject the notion that more people means more progress. Enabling more people to contribute their creativity to the process and improving our systems for testing and scaling useful ideas seem much more likely to deliver true human progress going forward, IMO.
I have been thinking and writing a good bit about this in recent years (see for example "What would sustainable capitalism look like?" https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6959139635713220608/). We really need much more clarity on what "progress" means and how we create and scale it. We have been measuring and encouraging the wrong things and making dubious assumptions about "human nature" and human potential.
I would rather we focus the world's productive engine on continuous improvement of quality of life for all of our children and their children's children, however many of them may be born. That seems to be the problem we should be working on.
The more liberal degrowth folks like to talk about "decoupling" the good features of economic growth from whatever features they perceive as bad or neutral. So we should actively pursue the positive things (health outcomes, economic security, political rights, etc) and be agnostic as to whether improving these metrics contributes to economic growth or not. I'm doubtful about this approach to growth, but I think it *is* the right approach to population concerns (over and under, fwiw). You've correctly identified a lot of good things population growth is correlated with and bad things population decline is correlated with. But thinking of population growth itself as a direct policy objective is an open invitation to illiberal thinking: social control, reproductive unfreedom, the works. Densification and urbanization may help counteract population decline, but those are worthwhile objectives anyway. Greater economic security via better welfare states may help boost births, but economic security is its own worthy goal. Subsidized childcare may encourage folks to have more children, but infrastructural childcare has its own better rationales in terms of women's liberation and labor force participation.
GDP per capita is correlated with population change and you cite research supporting causality. The Japan story is well known, especially to us financial types (the Nikkei bubble, fear of MITI crushing US competitiveness, etc). And Robert Gordon poured plenty of cold water on the notion that productivity growth will compensate for an aging population (although his excellent book was before today’s AI and 3D printing developments). But the end of capitalism? I’m afraid the culprit for that is already in place. Market economies in the Anthropocene can only thrive if prices reflect the true (societal) costs of production. And societal today arguably means global. The social cost of carbon is a good example of a sensible global calculation methodology. Do governments take over, ala Green New Deals, or do free-marketeers start supporting (Pigovian) externality pricing? I think even aging capitalist economies can thrive if fixing market failures is prioritized over protecting vested interests in sunset industries, most critically fossil fuels. And Nordhaus style climate clubs can keep such interventions at the national level versus the international authority many fear.
Great article on depopulation. Calling Trump and his voters “authoritarian populists,” though, is a silly, intellectually lazy recitation of statist narrative that is simple projection. Trump’s base is anti-authoritarian. In the face of a runaway federal bureaucracy (and many state bureaucracies,) Marxist control masquerading as “environmentalism,” corrupt law enforcement and intelligence agencies, state collaboration with corporations to censor and suppress dissent, totalitarian wokeism, and so on, calling those who oppose all this “totalitarian” is either shockingly clueless or deliberately dishonest.
This paper fails to mention how globalization (off-shoring of manufacturing jobs & displacement of American workers using immigration) gutted manufacturing jobs in the blue collar sector, and how financialization has obliterated the middle class. Those are two huge factors that have also contributed to why we are suffering from a fertility crisis. Yes, it’s true that majority of Americans aren’t interested in having 6 children (unless they’re Amish or Mormon), but there are many that want to have children but are held back because the current economic conditions make it difficult to do so.
I suspect that many of the correlations cited here are not ones in which population decline is the causal factor. For example, in counties in the United States where population is declining, I suspect that demoralization and economic hollowing out are more of a cause, and population decline is more of an effect.
First, America's TFR has been dropping since 1800, not 1870. While it is true that the demographic transition is associated with industrialization, in our case, it preceded industrialization.
Second, this point is ENTIRELY incorrect: "a high-birth-rate, high-death-rate society is very young, with a median age of 15 or so. That means that most of its people are children, below the modern working age; its “dependency ratio,” or the ratio of people too young or old to work to the working-age population, is accordingly quite high." That's only true if you have child-labor laws in effect. In most pre-industrial societies, including the US, children as young as five were expected to put in ten or twelve hour days of work for at least six days a week (on a farm, it was closer to seven full days, and America was 80% agricultural for the first century).
A strong argument can be made that mandatory schooling was put in place around the end of the 1800s precisely to keep children out of the workforce. Early mandatory schooling laws were universally hated, as they seriously cut into family income. In Massachusetts, troops were not uncommonly required to escort children to school over parental objections.
Industrial concerns mandated schooling precisely because they intended to undercut family income, and force families to rely on only parental income. The reduced income from stripping children of wages gave industry leverage to force parents to toe the industrial line, lest they lose the parents lose their jobs and put the family at risk of starvation.
With the rise of AI and on-line learning, child labor laws might be dispensed with in order to deal with labor shortages.
That's an excellent parody given what you had to work with. Mind you, I love parodies. I grew up on Mad Magazine, and appreciate the way a good parody makes one think about things.
The population scare of the 1970s led to a lot of work on population control, increasing food production, improved public health and other actions that have led us to our current state. Sometimes it makes sense to scare people a little. The problem is that it is much harder to make falling population as scary as rising population. After all, we've already been there. Was the economy that much less dynamic in 1870 or 1950? The population was less than half of what it is today. Brad deLong, for example, considers the economy starting around 1870 as quite dynamic and with a world population of a mere 1.3 billion.
Is the problem the age distribution? Are old people a drag on innovation or is the problem that old people are an underused resource? Farmers, for example, reach peak productivity in their 50s. Try getting a tech job in your 50s or later. Lots of well qualified, creative engineers retire early because they aren't considered good cultural fits at more modern companies. It has nothing to do with creativity, technical knowledge or ability.
There's also the problem of arguing for infinite growth. It's easy to imagine a falling population reaching some lower level and stabilizing. Perhaps then it would be easier to induce a low population scare, though, what usually happens when populations fall dramatically is that they return to growth as ecological, economic and social space become more available. Those periods are often referred to by later historians as a "golden age" with rising incomes, innovation and other changes for the better. It's the we've been there, done that problem. Worse, if the the problem is that if some decades of falling population is to be considered a disaster, then one has to face a population of 10 or 20 billion or even 50 billion or 100 billion abd find oneself arguing that such a population or perhaps ten or a hundred times it has to be considered preferable to the dread stagnation that a population of a mere three billion would lead to.
Economic growth can fuel population growth, and it can fuel rising living standards. Is our problem that capitalism as practiced today has been too focused on population induced growth at the expense of raising living standards. We have had plenty of productivity growth in the US over the last 40 years, but wages have fallen well behind. Where is our thirty hour work week? It might help to consider that modern demographic transition started in France in the 18th century.
That's right, the demographic transition did not start in the 19th century. It started in France in the mid-18th century. That's when French fertility rates dropped and GDP per capita rose dramatically. England didn't catch up in terms of GDP per capita until a century later, industrial revolution and all. Meanwhile, France had a radical political restructuring that England avoided. That was also when the France got its reputation for sexual license, as there was a lot of open discussion of techniques for getting off without getting babies. Even Casanova was using condoms by 1760.
Maybe scaring ourselves about falling population makes sense, if it makes us consider the problems of capitalism and our social structure. I don't think capitalism has to go away. It has it's good points. It's like fire. Fire is an excellent thing for cooking food, lighting the night, warming the home, processing materials and a host of other things. Still, one doesn't set fire to one's house on cold days or ignite one end of the roast to cook the other. Fire is great, but it needs to be properly controlled. Capitalism is similar. Now that the world population may soon be falling, it is time to rethink or hearthstones and cooking pots.
I think that fertility rates could be improved, but it would require more than fiddling.
Just ask yourself if you would have more children if the child tax credit were $20,000 a year instead of $2,000. The answer is obviously yes is it not. And honestly we could afford it.
I think the real problem is we just aren't willing to spend the resources. Kids can't vote, and parents don't get votes for their kids. The childless want to free ride on the child bearers, because they can.
This is a huge problem for colleges and universities, as the traditional-age (18-22 year old) population shrinks.
> The economic incentives to have more children (to help out on the farm, to take care of you in your old age, to “hoard” children against the distinct possibility that some of them will die) steadily diminished
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/was_having_kids.html
I think it's more plausible that this is a matter of status. Having a large number of kids might give you status among the Satmar Hasidim, but not among most Americans.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/05/french-fertility-fall.html
A tired cliché perhaps but true nonetheless: “The future belongs to those that have babies.” Not us.
No where in your article did I ever see it mention that having children is WORK. Necessary work, vital work, and sometimes even rewarding work, but still a massive huge gigantic amount WORK. Someone needs to be taking care, in some manner, of a child pretty much 24/7 for at least the first seven years. After that it's less work but still a gigantic amount of parent's "free time" is spent doing childcare, childcare that if they didn't want to do it they would have to pay someone else to do it, so they are working. Now, is it generally easier to get humans to do voluntary unpaid work or is it generally easier to have them decline to do extra unpaid work? The question answers itself.
Another great read. Please continue with your writing, it’s much appreciated!
Minor correction: DeLong's book is "Slouching Towards Utopia" ("stumbling" may not be all that different, but you lose his Yeats allusion).
Once again, thank-you Brink. I have been looking for a thoughtful review of the status and possible impacts of birth rate declines and you delivered, once again. And once again, I have a contrarian view. To start, if the impact of Covid on birth rates holds up, many are predicting population will top out at 9 Billion or so rather than 11 or 12 Billion and in my mind, this might be very good news, rather than a crisis.
The challenge, in my mind, is to solve the problem of quality of life ("peace and prosperity?") for 10 Billion people rather than how to shore up or re-start the growth engines of the last 300 years. This means, for starters, focusing the creative effort of the human endeavor on increased sustainability and quality of life, rather than traditional measures of growth. This includes providing sufficient incentives for continued progress and the freedom for all to make their contribution. Humans are problem solving animals and these challenges should provide plenty of problems to solve for the indefinite future.
I disagree that the issue is the gross number of innovations and reject the notion that more people means more progress. Enabling more people to contribute their creativity to the process and improving our systems for testing and scaling useful ideas seem much more likely to deliver true human progress going forward, IMO.
I have been thinking and writing a good bit about this in recent years (see for example "What would sustainable capitalism look like?" https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6959139635713220608/). We really need much more clarity on what "progress" means and how we create and scale it. We have been measuring and encouraging the wrong things and making dubious assumptions about "human nature" and human potential.
I would rather we focus the world's productive engine on continuous improvement of quality of life for all of our children and their children's children, however many of them may be born. That seems to be the problem we should be working on.
The more liberal degrowth folks like to talk about "decoupling" the good features of economic growth from whatever features they perceive as bad or neutral. So we should actively pursue the positive things (health outcomes, economic security, political rights, etc) and be agnostic as to whether improving these metrics contributes to economic growth or not. I'm doubtful about this approach to growth, but I think it *is* the right approach to population concerns (over and under, fwiw). You've correctly identified a lot of good things population growth is correlated with and bad things population decline is correlated with. But thinking of population growth itself as a direct policy objective is an open invitation to illiberal thinking: social control, reproductive unfreedom, the works. Densification and urbanization may help counteract population decline, but those are worthwhile objectives anyway. Greater economic security via better welfare states may help boost births, but economic security is its own worthy goal. Subsidized childcare may encourage folks to have more children, but infrastructural childcare has its own better rationales in terms of women's liberation and labor force participation.
GDP per capita is correlated with population change and you cite research supporting causality. The Japan story is well known, especially to us financial types (the Nikkei bubble, fear of MITI crushing US competitiveness, etc). And Robert Gordon poured plenty of cold water on the notion that productivity growth will compensate for an aging population (although his excellent book was before today’s AI and 3D printing developments). But the end of capitalism? I’m afraid the culprit for that is already in place. Market economies in the Anthropocene can only thrive if prices reflect the true (societal) costs of production. And societal today arguably means global. The social cost of carbon is a good example of a sensible global calculation methodology. Do governments take over, ala Green New Deals, or do free-marketeers start supporting (Pigovian) externality pricing? I think even aging capitalist economies can thrive if fixing market failures is prioritized over protecting vested interests in sunset industries, most critically fossil fuels. And Nordhaus style climate clubs can keep such interventions at the national level versus the international authority many fear.
Great article on depopulation. Calling Trump and his voters “authoritarian populists,” though, is a silly, intellectually lazy recitation of statist narrative that is simple projection. Trump’s base is anti-authoritarian. In the face of a runaway federal bureaucracy (and many state bureaucracies,) Marxist control masquerading as “environmentalism,” corrupt law enforcement and intelligence agencies, state collaboration with corporations to censor and suppress dissent, totalitarian wokeism, and so on, calling those who oppose all this “totalitarian” is either shockingly clueless or deliberately dishonest.
This paper fails to mention how globalization (off-shoring of manufacturing jobs & displacement of American workers using immigration) gutted manufacturing jobs in the blue collar sector, and how financialization has obliterated the middle class. Those are two huge factors that have also contributed to why we are suffering from a fertility crisis. Yes, it’s true that majority of Americans aren’t interested in having 6 children (unless they’re Amish or Mormon), but there are many that want to have children but are held back because the current economic conditions make it difficult to do so.
I suspect that many of the correlations cited here are not ones in which population decline is the causal factor. For example, in counties in the United States where population is declining, I suspect that demoralization and economic hollowing out are more of a cause, and population decline is more of an effect.
India's fertility rate is 2.1 or lower now. It's dropped a little already.
Perhaps religious groups, such as in Israel, will come to change things.
In the future the US may wind up much more Morman, Amish and Jewish than it is now.
Two points in the essay are incorrect.
First, America's TFR has been dropping since 1800, not 1870. While it is true that the demographic transition is associated with industrialization, in our case, it preceded industrialization.
Second, this point is ENTIRELY incorrect: "a high-birth-rate, high-death-rate society is very young, with a median age of 15 or so. That means that most of its people are children, below the modern working age; its “dependency ratio,” or the ratio of people too young or old to work to the working-age population, is accordingly quite high." That's only true if you have child-labor laws in effect. In most pre-industrial societies, including the US, children as young as five were expected to put in ten or twelve hour days of work for at least six days a week (on a farm, it was closer to seven full days, and America was 80% agricultural for the first century).
A strong argument can be made that mandatory schooling was put in place around the end of the 1800s precisely to keep children out of the workforce. Early mandatory schooling laws were universally hated, as they seriously cut into family income. In Massachusetts, troops were not uncommonly required to escort children to school over parental objections.
Industrial concerns mandated schooling precisely because they intended to undercut family income, and force families to rely on only parental income. The reduced income from stripping children of wages gave industry leverage to force parents to toe the industrial line, lest they lose the parents lose their jobs and put the family at risk of starvation.
With the rise of AI and on-line learning, child labor laws might be dispensed with in order to deal with labor shortages.
That's an excellent parody given what you had to work with. Mind you, I love parodies. I grew up on Mad Magazine, and appreciate the way a good parody makes one think about things.
The population scare of the 1970s led to a lot of work on population control, increasing food production, improved public health and other actions that have led us to our current state. Sometimes it makes sense to scare people a little. The problem is that it is much harder to make falling population as scary as rising population. After all, we've already been there. Was the economy that much less dynamic in 1870 or 1950? The population was less than half of what it is today. Brad deLong, for example, considers the economy starting around 1870 as quite dynamic and with a world population of a mere 1.3 billion.
Is the problem the age distribution? Are old people a drag on innovation or is the problem that old people are an underused resource? Farmers, for example, reach peak productivity in their 50s. Try getting a tech job in your 50s or later. Lots of well qualified, creative engineers retire early because they aren't considered good cultural fits at more modern companies. It has nothing to do with creativity, technical knowledge or ability.
There's also the problem of arguing for infinite growth. It's easy to imagine a falling population reaching some lower level and stabilizing. Perhaps then it would be easier to induce a low population scare, though, what usually happens when populations fall dramatically is that they return to growth as ecological, economic and social space become more available. Those periods are often referred to by later historians as a "golden age" with rising incomes, innovation and other changes for the better. It's the we've been there, done that problem. Worse, if the the problem is that if some decades of falling population is to be considered a disaster, then one has to face a population of 10 or 20 billion or even 50 billion or 100 billion abd find oneself arguing that such a population or perhaps ten or a hundred times it has to be considered preferable to the dread stagnation that a population of a mere three billion would lead to.
Economic growth can fuel population growth, and it can fuel rising living standards. Is our problem that capitalism as practiced today has been too focused on population induced growth at the expense of raising living standards. We have had plenty of productivity growth in the US over the last 40 years, but wages have fallen well behind. Where is our thirty hour work week? It might help to consider that modern demographic transition started in France in the 18th century.
That's right, the demographic transition did not start in the 19th century. It started in France in the mid-18th century. That's when French fertility rates dropped and GDP per capita rose dramatically. England didn't catch up in terms of GDP per capita until a century later, industrial revolution and all. Meanwhile, France had a radical political restructuring that England avoided. That was also when the France got its reputation for sexual license, as there was a lot of open discussion of techniques for getting off without getting babies. Even Casanova was using condoms by 1760.
Maybe scaring ourselves about falling population makes sense, if it makes us consider the problems of capitalism and our social structure. I don't think capitalism has to go away. It has it's good points. It's like fire. Fire is an excellent thing for cooking food, lighting the night, warming the home, processing materials and a host of other things. Still, one doesn't set fire to one's house on cold days or ignite one end of the roast to cook the other. Fire is great, but it needs to be properly controlled. Capitalism is similar. Now that the world population may soon be falling, it is time to rethink or hearthstones and cooking pots.