In my last essay I returned to the subject of the global fertility collapse, the unexpected and underappreciated trend that in my view confronts us with the permanent problem at its most devilish.
Well mused. :) I do, however wish to turn this discussion toward what to DO to offset some of the consequences of of ageing, declining populations.:
Financing transfers to the elderly with a VAT instead of a wage tax
Focus medical and pharmaceutical research toward prolonging health working lives
And reducing the disincentives to childrearing, especially the opportunity costs to women's careers. Here I would argue that transfers to young families rearing children are as worthwhile as transfer to older adults.
In the next essay I talk about possible government responses, some of them dystopian. Sensible, modest measures are worth doing, but they don't seem capable of pushing us back above replacement fertility.
I have written about this topic a few times. So glad to see you discussing this as well. Humanity is not prepared for this. Imagine a less extreme version of "I am Legend." Empty and decaying apartment blocks. Some roads become overgrown because they are not worth maintaining. Planes still fly, but fewer and fewer routes are available as demand drops... It's not an inspiring vision at all. Beyond this a shrinking population likely means less innovation and stagnate growth.
In a world with no economic growth, getting ahead is once again a zero sum game of stealing it from others. My gain must mean your loss; the pie is getting no bigger, after all. In such a world, our deepest demons could be reawakened.
A few thoughts I would invite you to consider in your subsequent essays:
- What are the ecological up sides to fewer humans?
- How should we “load balance” the humans currently on the planet so that the most capable humans (younger and healthier) are located in proximity to where we have already concentrated resources to create value?
- What cultural conversations should we be having regarding elder and end of life care? From the front lines I can assure you that the medical institutions are starting to decay. We already augment care due to shortage of human capital (aka nurses and certain medical specialists). See Ezekiel J. Emanuel, “WHY I HOPE TO DIE AT 75”, The Atlantic Monthly, October 2014.
- What are you personally doing to provide care to children born in this decade, both within the immediate family and within the community?
Without a doubt, there's an ecological upside to depopulation. As an unapologetic speciesist, however, that's a bad trade in my book. I don't see any possibility of top-down load balancing, but I can imagine a bottom-up process in the form of increased migration flows. I haven't really focused on the fact that a shrinking society is a very old society, with lots of associated problems, but that's an important part of the picture. As to my role in all this, I'm a parent of three and stepparent of two, and I promise you I'll nag for grandchildren.
A quibble on N. Korea vs S. Korea: should we really believe N. Korean fertility figures? Given how much, for example, China has clearly falsified their economic growth statistics, wouldn't North Korean stats be worth at least as much skepticism?
It's a good point -- I poked around a little but couldn't find any skepticism expressed about the fertility numbers. Bizarre to even imagine that 100 years from now the nighttime photos of the Korean peninsula might show the opposite contrast.
I think other countries will experience the same trend that Japan/Tokyo have seen where the largest city sucks up all available population.
I especially wonder how it will skew national politics in those places where the capital and the biggest city aren't the same. Obviously that tension already exists but imagine how much tenser it will be in 2100 when Canberra, Brasilia, Ottawa, Beijing, Islamabad, Taipei, Ankara, and Hanoi are shrinking and heavily skewed towards the geriatric crowd as the biggest city continues to attract everyone.
Young people are more pessimistic than ever about our future. Climate change, COVID, economic inequality, habitat and species loss, plastics in the ocean and in our food, Donald Trump ending democracy, school shootings, opioids, economic instability, the list goes on.
This pessimism has real consequences. Many of the young people I talk with think it's unethical to have children because the world (in their view) is in a death spiral. For example nearly 40% of Americans think it's likely that climate change will make the Earth uninhabitable:
Young people are more pessimistic than ever about our future. Climate change, COVID, economic inequality, habitat and species loss, plastics in the ocean and in our food, Donald Trump ending democracy, school shootings, opioids, economic instability, the list goes on.
This pessimism has real consequences. Many of the young people I talk with think it's unethical to have children because the world (in their view) is in a death spiral. For example nearly 40% of Americans think it's likely that climate change will make the Earth uninhabitable:
I agree that deepening pessimism is a contributor to falling fertility. It's striking that this demoralization kicked in just as the world had become dramatically richer, healthier, fairer, and freer than ever before.
I mentioned the possibility briefly in this earlier essay. Bottom line: AI and robots do offer a possible replacement for missing researchers and workers. But what about the missing consumers?
Presumably depopulation will have a moderating effect on housing costs, which have outpaced median wage growth for two generations. In the surveys I’ve seen in the US, women want to have more children but don’t because of costs. Is there any evidence that cheaper housing will lead to more births?
Not necessarily. If the remaining population starts congregating in fewer and fewer cities for economic opportunities it could cause prices in those cities to remain high even while the population as a whole declines.
A declining population does not absolve us of our responsibility to build more housing.
I’m thinking it would create a rebound effect towards a new equilibrium with growth. It’s not going to happen all at once. Housing prices will just stop outpacing inflation and after 10 years they’re affordable again.
Maybe...But it's very complicated. If a supply constrained place stagnates or even declines it can still maintain property values because you have lots of induced demand. People living with roommates or in small ADU's get their own places.
And then prices start going back up again.
Long term you have to build lots to maintain affordabiity. It turns out it's pretty hard to build enough to keep up with population when it is growing for more than a few decades
As an example tons of homes were built between 1945 and 1970 when population grew from around 140M to 200M. But the overall pace of building actually slowed down post 1970 even as population grew from 200M to 350M.
I'm not one for predicting the future. But I would add this to your list of "master trends" that may influence that future. I am talking of the gathering storm that is threatening to sink what has been (for the last few centuries) the world's great economic/cultural hegemon.....Judeo-Christian, Eurocentric, Enlightement Liberalism. Whatever will replace it - whether made in SE Asia or just some global reassertion of Paganism or religious fevour - will have a big influence on the fertility or otherwise of that future. I discuss the gathering storm in this essay: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
I can't remember where I heard this, but the numbers are actually worse, in the sense of lower. China may well have been inflating their tfr for while. The States is 1.67 and isn't rebounding. It's still going down. Here in Canada were now lowest low -- 1.26 - and it is unlikely to change except, possibly to go lower. I think it will go lower. The thing is, as you point out, since people live so long, it doesn't register that this could be a crisis. Immigration is indeed a solution but no indefinitely and immigrants tend to assimilate and follow the family-formation patterns of their new country. In Canada we're quite possibly in the lowest-low fertility trap, meaning we may never get out of it. But that too might be global in the sense that there is no country that once it's fertility starts to tank, has been known to recover. I think this needs a lot more thought! Thanks for giving it some. Stephen Shaw's Birth gap work is also interesting. It's basically about the fact that more and more women are not having children and only a relatively small percentage of those are from choice. But again, thanks, this is exsistentially real important.
You lost me right here: "By inducing an ongoing drop in fertility that has spread around the world, capitalist mass affluence now threatens to short-circuit social progress altogether." Periods of falling population are historically associated with major social progress. Consider Rome after it lost over 10% of its population defeating Carthage, the Black Death in Europe leading to the Renaissance, and the carnage of World War II leading to an unprecedented era of growth. Lower population meant more resources per capita which opened the way for new ways of doing things and major social and material progress.
Now, it is possible that the current slowing of population growth and possible decline might have different consequences, but it's hard to see why. Our technology isn't going to go away. We'll be forced to push it forward to increase productivity. This is what happened with European settlers moving into North America. A smaller population doesn't mean we will become less vibrant or creative. Down to four billion? Been there, did that, wore the lime green leisure suit. Were we that much less creative in 1974? Did doubling our population let us deal better with our challenges by sheer dint of an additional four billion souls? That's not the impression I get.
It's easier to argue that our rising population is suppressing social progress, innovation, [other good things] and the cause of human freedom.
P.S. Good luck with your theory that massive layoffs are a sign of imminent corporate bankruptcy. There are so many Wall Street investors who seem to get it backwards.
I think what is missing in the discussion of a shrinking global population is how that 4 billion is distributed across age cohorts. The earth has had many fewer people before but there was always a more-or-less consistent pyramid shape to the demographic. When the pyramid is reversed, that is , the bulk of the population is over 50, then over 60 or older then creativity does indeed tend to strongly decrease. In general, older adults are much more conservative. Not all, of course, but in general. It isn't the same 4 billion, that's the rub, otherwise, yeah, why not? Also, because of limits on human biology -- many fewer fertile women strongly affects the future of that 4 billion. If only a quarter of that 4 billion are fertile women who then choose to not have children, then... In the '70's we still had a much larger proportion of fertile women and of those women, many if not most expected to have kids. The 'norm' which is so important, hadn't changed that significantly from the early '60's and '50's in the sense that having children was still more-or-less assumed -- although women had many fewer kids, they still had them. That has changed. The norm in Canada for eg., for still fertile women could well be to not have them. That is really kind of chilling to try and understand where it might go.
If you look at the mathematics of population distribution, there are only so many possibilities. You can have lots of young people if your population is growing. You can have lots of old people if your population is shrinking. If your population is stable and mortality is similar to what we are experiencing now, you are going to wind up with about half the population prime working age, a quarter young and a quarter old. There are ways around this, but they're mainly addressed elsewhere, usually in dystopian science fiction stories.
I'm not sure older people are that much less creative. They are just likely to have shorter creative lives if only because old people have shorter life expectancies.
One of the things that got me thinking about this is my own age group. We were sort of the hinge generation in that we began our reproductive lives just when the social/sexual norms had revolutionized as a result of the '60's. Apart from all the emotional carnage what is striking is what I've noticed as we had children. It seemed to happen so slowly -- was 40 odd years -- but it has so changed. While my age group did form families, in the main, we did so much later than our parents. in our thirties in many cases instead of twenties. But our kids, now in their late twenties and mid thirties aren't having kids. For eg., I have five cousins. They each married (eventually) and all had at least two kids. One had three another four. So respectable demographics right? But not one of those 13 odd kids has kids and they're all in their thirties. Only one is married and she's 36 -- no kids. That's it. That's one fast transition! I mean conceivably there could still be a couple of grandkids yet, but clearly not the 26 or more you'd expect if things hadn't spun on a dime. It does make you think of science fiction, like Arthur c. Clarke's "Childhood's End".
There was a baby boom in the 1920s after the War To End All Wars with all its government spending, military fervor, higher taxes and the presence of death. They called it the roaring 20s, and almost everyone I knew of my generation had parents born in the early 1920s. My father was a lone exception born in 1910 or perhaps 1912 depending on which birth certificate you believe.
No one was having children in the 1930s. The Great Depression was the golden era of the latex condom usually marketed with a 1920s sounding name like Sheik, Ramses or Trojans. Demographers were worried, but no one pontificated about the dearth of babies. The economy was in terrible shape and everyone knew and admitted it. It didn't get better until the late 1930s the War That Came After The War To End All Wars started.
Women delayed or avoided having children in the 1930s. Marriages were less common. It was all considered the new normal. Then that war ended with outrageous tax rates, massive GI benefits programs, military fervor and so on. Demographers were predicting a post-war baby bust. The baby boom was a surprise. It shouldn't have been. War rationing and a booming war economy meant mountains of savings waiting for civilian production to restart and, unlike the previous big war, veterans were given all sorts of benefits.
I think demographers and politicians who blather about the dearth of babies circa 2024 should take a good look at the economy. We had a depression starting around 2008 and we have barely recovered if we have recovered at all. It's like 1936 when the Great Depression officially ended and the general response was huh? really? I can only imagine that economists and demographers never had parents and never were parents, so the basic realities of becoming a parent are opaque to them.
That presence of death thing with regards to the Great War reminded me of one of the greatest soppy ads of all time. It's hard to read the Barre granite ad "Aunt Meg … who never married." with a dry eye.
Well mused. :) I do, however wish to turn this discussion toward what to DO to offset some of the consequences of of ageing, declining populations.:
Financing transfers to the elderly with a VAT instead of a wage tax
Focus medical and pharmaceutical research toward prolonging health working lives
And reducing the disincentives to childrearing, especially the opportunity costs to women's careers. Here I would argue that transfers to young families rearing children are as worthwhile as transfer to older adults.
In the next essay I talk about possible government responses, some of them dystopian. Sensible, modest measures are worth doing, but they don't seem capable of pushing us back above replacement fertility.
Radical life extension. AI and robotics.
I have written about this topic a few times. So glad to see you discussing this as well. Humanity is not prepared for this. Imagine a less extreme version of "I am Legend." Empty and decaying apartment blocks. Some roads become overgrown because they are not worth maintaining. Planes still fly, but fewer and fewer routes are available as demand drops... It's not an inspiring vision at all. Beyond this a shrinking population likely means less innovation and stagnate growth.
In a world with no economic growth, getting ahead is once again a zero sum game of stealing it from others. My gain must mean your loss; the pie is getting no bigger, after all. In such a world, our deepest demons could be reawakened.
Given so many scenarios that are so weird and unsettling, it really surprises me we haven't seen more sci fi set in a depopulating world.
We will. The reality that we face an empty planet is beginning to enter the public consciousness.
A few thoughts I would invite you to consider in your subsequent essays:
- What are the ecological up sides to fewer humans?
- How should we “load balance” the humans currently on the planet so that the most capable humans (younger and healthier) are located in proximity to where we have already concentrated resources to create value?
- What cultural conversations should we be having regarding elder and end of life care? From the front lines I can assure you that the medical institutions are starting to decay. We already augment care due to shortage of human capital (aka nurses and certain medical specialists). See Ezekiel J. Emanuel, “WHY I HOPE TO DIE AT 75”, The Atlantic Monthly, October 2014.
- What are you personally doing to provide care to children born in this decade, both within the immediate family and within the community?
Without a doubt, there's an ecological upside to depopulation. As an unapologetic speciesist, however, that's a bad trade in my book. I don't see any possibility of top-down load balancing, but I can imagine a bottom-up process in the form of increased migration flows. I haven't really focused on the fact that a shrinking society is a very old society, with lots of associated problems, but that's an important part of the picture. As to my role in all this, I'm a parent of three and stepparent of two, and I promise you I'll nag for grandchildren.
A quibble on N. Korea vs S. Korea: should we really believe N. Korean fertility figures? Given how much, for example, China has clearly falsified their economic growth statistics, wouldn't North Korean stats be worth at least as much skepticism?
It's a good point -- I poked around a little but couldn't find any skepticism expressed about the fertility numbers. Bizarre to even imagine that 100 years from now the nighttime photos of the Korean peninsula might show the opposite contrast.
I think other countries will experience the same trend that Japan/Tokyo have seen where the largest city sucks up all available population.
I especially wonder how it will skew national politics in those places where the capital and the biggest city aren't the same. Obviously that tension already exists but imagine how much tenser it will be in 2100 when Canberra, Brasilia, Ottawa, Beijing, Islamabad, Taipei, Ankara, and Hanoi are shrinking and heavily skewed towards the geriatric crowd as the biggest city continues to attract everyone.
Young people are more pessimistic than ever about our future. Climate change, COVID, economic inequality, habitat and species loss, plastics in the ocean and in our food, Donald Trump ending democracy, school shootings, opioids, economic instability, the list goes on.
This pessimism has real consequences. Many of the young people I talk with think it's unethical to have children because the world (in their view) is in a death spiral. For example nearly 40% of Americans think it's likely that climate change will make the Earth uninhabitable:
https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/42262-americans-say-climate-change-earth-uninhabitable
It's hard to convince someone to have kids if they honestly feel the world is trending in such a negative direction.
And Biden and the Democrats ending democracy with lawfare, ignoring Supreme Court decisions, using regulatory powers to get around the law, etc.
Young people are more pessimistic than ever about our future. Climate change, COVID, economic inequality, habitat and species loss, plastics in the ocean and in our food, Donald Trump ending democracy, school shootings, opioids, economic instability, the list goes on.
This pessimism has real consequences. Many of the young people I talk with think it's unethical to have children because the world (in their view) is in a death spiral. For example nearly 40% of Americans think it's likely that climate change will make the Earth uninhabitable:
https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/42262-americans-say-climate-change-earth-uninhabitable
It's hard to convince someone to have kids if they honestly feel the world is trending in such a negative direction.
I agree that deepening pessimism is a contributor to falling fertility. It's striking that this demoralization kicked in just as the world had become dramatically richer, healthier, fairer, and freer than ever before.
I wonder if you could comment on if and how automation/AI/robots, etc. might mitigate the risks of depopulation?
I mentioned the possibility briefly in this earlier essay. Bottom line: AI and robots do offer a possible replacement for missing researchers and workers. But what about the missing consumers?
Presumably depopulation will have a moderating effect on housing costs, which have outpaced median wage growth for two generations. In the surveys I’ve seen in the US, women want to have more children but don’t because of costs. Is there any evidence that cheaper housing will lead to more births?
Not necessarily. If the remaining population starts congregating in fewer and fewer cities for economic opportunities it could cause prices in those cities to remain high even while the population as a whole declines.
A declining population does not absolve us of our responsibility to build more housing.
Yes but if you depend on declining population to make housing affordable you have already lost the battle.
I’m thinking it would create a rebound effect towards a new equilibrium with growth. It’s not going to happen all at once. Housing prices will just stop outpacing inflation and after 10 years they’re affordable again.
Maybe...But it's very complicated. If a supply constrained place stagnates or even declines it can still maintain property values because you have lots of induced demand. People living with roommates or in small ADU's get their own places.
And then prices start going back up again.
Long term you have to build lots to maintain affordabiity. It turns out it's pretty hard to build enough to keep up with population when it is growing for more than a few decades
As an example tons of homes were built between 1945 and 1970 when population grew from around 140M to 200M. But the overall pace of building actually slowed down post 1970 even as population grew from 200M to 350M.
Shouldn't South Korea be taking lots of immigrants from North Korea?
Hard to let em in if the other side won't let em out.
The South just has to pay for them. It's what West Germany did
I'm not one for predicting the future. But I would add this to your list of "master trends" that may influence that future. I am talking of the gathering storm that is threatening to sink what has been (for the last few centuries) the world's great economic/cultural hegemon.....Judeo-Christian, Eurocentric, Enlightement Liberalism. Whatever will replace it - whether made in SE Asia or just some global reassertion of Paganism or religious fevour - will have a big influence on the fertility or otherwise of that future. I discuss the gathering storm in this essay: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
I can't remember where I heard this, but the numbers are actually worse, in the sense of lower. China may well have been inflating their tfr for while. The States is 1.67 and isn't rebounding. It's still going down. Here in Canada were now lowest low -- 1.26 - and it is unlikely to change except, possibly to go lower. I think it will go lower. The thing is, as you point out, since people live so long, it doesn't register that this could be a crisis. Immigration is indeed a solution but no indefinitely and immigrants tend to assimilate and follow the family-formation patterns of their new country. In Canada we're quite possibly in the lowest-low fertility trap, meaning we may never get out of it. But that too might be global in the sense that there is no country that once it's fertility starts to tank, has been known to recover. I think this needs a lot more thought! Thanks for giving it some. Stephen Shaw's Birth gap work is also interesting. It's basically about the fact that more and more women are not having children and only a relatively small percentage of those are from choice. But again, thanks, this is exsistentially real important.
You lost me right here: "By inducing an ongoing drop in fertility that has spread around the world, capitalist mass affluence now threatens to short-circuit social progress altogether." Periods of falling population are historically associated with major social progress. Consider Rome after it lost over 10% of its population defeating Carthage, the Black Death in Europe leading to the Renaissance, and the carnage of World War II leading to an unprecedented era of growth. Lower population meant more resources per capita which opened the way for new ways of doing things and major social and material progress.
Now, it is possible that the current slowing of population growth and possible decline might have different consequences, but it's hard to see why. Our technology isn't going to go away. We'll be forced to push it forward to increase productivity. This is what happened with European settlers moving into North America. A smaller population doesn't mean we will become less vibrant or creative. Down to four billion? Been there, did that, wore the lime green leisure suit. Were we that much less creative in 1974? Did doubling our population let us deal better with our challenges by sheer dint of an additional four billion souls? That's not the impression I get.
It's easier to argue that our rising population is suppressing social progress, innovation, [other good things] and the cause of human freedom.
P.S. Good luck with your theory that massive layoffs are a sign of imminent corporate bankruptcy. There are so many Wall Street investors who seem to get it backwards.
I think what is missing in the discussion of a shrinking global population is how that 4 billion is distributed across age cohorts. The earth has had many fewer people before but there was always a more-or-less consistent pyramid shape to the demographic. When the pyramid is reversed, that is , the bulk of the population is over 50, then over 60 or older then creativity does indeed tend to strongly decrease. In general, older adults are much more conservative. Not all, of course, but in general. It isn't the same 4 billion, that's the rub, otherwise, yeah, why not? Also, because of limits on human biology -- many fewer fertile women strongly affects the future of that 4 billion. If only a quarter of that 4 billion are fertile women who then choose to not have children, then... In the '70's we still had a much larger proportion of fertile women and of those women, many if not most expected to have kids. The 'norm' which is so important, hadn't changed that significantly from the early '60's and '50's in the sense that having children was still more-or-less assumed -- although women had many fewer kids, they still had them. That has changed. The norm in Canada for eg., for still fertile women could well be to not have them. That is really kind of chilling to try and understand where it might go.
If you look at the mathematics of population distribution, there are only so many possibilities. You can have lots of young people if your population is growing. You can have lots of old people if your population is shrinking. If your population is stable and mortality is similar to what we are experiencing now, you are going to wind up with about half the population prime working age, a quarter young and a quarter old. There are ways around this, but they're mainly addressed elsewhere, usually in dystopian science fiction stories.
I'm not sure older people are that much less creative. They are just likely to have shorter creative lives if only because old people have shorter life expectancies.
One of the things that got me thinking about this is my own age group. We were sort of the hinge generation in that we began our reproductive lives just when the social/sexual norms had revolutionized as a result of the '60's. Apart from all the emotional carnage what is striking is what I've noticed as we had children. It seemed to happen so slowly -- was 40 odd years -- but it has so changed. While my age group did form families, in the main, we did so much later than our parents. in our thirties in many cases instead of twenties. But our kids, now in their late twenties and mid thirties aren't having kids. For eg., I have five cousins. They each married (eventually) and all had at least two kids. One had three another four. So respectable demographics right? But not one of those 13 odd kids has kids and they're all in their thirties. Only one is married and she's 36 -- no kids. That's it. That's one fast transition! I mean conceivably there could still be a couple of grandkids yet, but clearly not the 26 or more you'd expect if things hadn't spun on a dime. It does make you think of science fiction, like Arthur c. Clarke's "Childhood's End".
There was a baby boom in the 1920s after the War To End All Wars with all its government spending, military fervor, higher taxes and the presence of death. They called it the roaring 20s, and almost everyone I knew of my generation had parents born in the early 1920s. My father was a lone exception born in 1910 or perhaps 1912 depending on which birth certificate you believe.
No one was having children in the 1930s. The Great Depression was the golden era of the latex condom usually marketed with a 1920s sounding name like Sheik, Ramses or Trojans. Demographers were worried, but no one pontificated about the dearth of babies. The economy was in terrible shape and everyone knew and admitted it. It didn't get better until the late 1930s the War That Came After The War To End All Wars started.
Women delayed or avoided having children in the 1930s. Marriages were less common. It was all considered the new normal. Then that war ended with outrageous tax rates, massive GI benefits programs, military fervor and so on. Demographers were predicting a post-war baby bust. The baby boom was a surprise. It shouldn't have been. War rationing and a booming war economy meant mountains of savings waiting for civilian production to restart and, unlike the previous big war, veterans were given all sorts of benefits.
I think demographers and politicians who blather about the dearth of babies circa 2024 should take a good look at the economy. We had a depression starting around 2008 and we have barely recovered if we have recovered at all. It's like 1936 when the Great Depression officially ended and the general response was huh? really? I can only imagine that economists and demographers never had parents and never were parents, so the basic realities of becoming a parent are opaque to them.
That presence of death thing with regards to the Great War reminded me of one of the greatest soppy ads of all time. It's hard to read the Barre granite ad "Aunt Meg … who never married." with a dry eye.
https://zoboko.com/text/nm8x8l3o/the-100-greatest-advertisements-1852-1958-who-wrote-them-and-what-they-did/72