The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.
if we have all those robots doing everything for us, why do we need children?
If we have all those robots doing everything we are we needed?
We could just kill ourselves, since we don't seem to care much for life, reproduction, and all that.
Intuition alone really isn't to be trusted with public policy decisions of this magnitude.
I agree, but shouldn’t the burden be on the people advocating mass immigration to prove it helps?
No, because freedom of movement and commerce (specifically, selling one's labor) are human rights. No right is absolute, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
those are not the poorest countries (e.g. no african countries are listed either)
Our World in Data: Fertility rate: births per woman - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t... To the surprise of demographers, African fertility is falling - https://www.mercatornet.com/to_the_surprise_of_demographers_... - September 19, 2024 > Previously in this space, under the heading “Africa Rising?” yours truly cited The Lancet’s latest population stats on sub-Saharan Africa: Sub-Saharan…
yes those are true but the fact remains that despite the falling rate, sub-saharan TFR is 4.5, while brazil is 1.6, iran 1.7 etc. The correlation of TFR with wealth is a fact
The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.
The mid-century Baby Boom came after WWII, and probably had very little to do with technology. The upswing started some time in late 1944 to mid 1945 as combat was winding down in Europe and a lot of young men were returning home. Otherwise fertility has been declining steadily since 1800 in western countries.
No, this is exactly the opposite of true: you need to do more reading about the baby boom. It happened across many countries, including ones which had little involvement in WWII, and in almost all cases it began in the 1930s, even with the Great Depression underway. It got supercharged by the end of the war because that's when the economic doldrums finally ended, but upward trend in fertility predated even the beginning of the war, never mind the end.
Right this is what I am saying. And I think that we should be outrageously skeptical of such people and oppose them with fervor. In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe. These people were wrong in every possible dimension and has we listened to them we would have committed a world-historic e…
> In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe. What is this referring to?
In the 70s, under IMF guidance, several governments of 3rd world countries implemented policies of mass sterilization.
I agree, but shouldn’t the burden be on the people advocating mass immigration to prove it helps?
No, because freedom of movement and commerce (specifically, selling one's labor) are human rights. No right is absolute, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
There is no “human right” to cross national borders. It’s the opposite. International law recognizes both the collective right of “peoples”—groups of people—to form nations, and the right of nations to their territorial integrity.
Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things lik…
India got there on overpopulation. Total fertility rate around 6 in 1965. India does not have enough water for its population.[1] China would have hit similar problems if not for their one-child policy. China managed to avoid the overshoot when medicine starts to work but the economy hasn't developed yet. India didn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_India
Erlich did not say "there will be scarcity." Erlich said that there would be hundreds of millions dead to starvation.
Right this is what I am saying. And I think that we should be outrageously skeptical of such people and oppose them with fervor. In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe. These people were wrong in every possible dimension and has we listened to them we would have committed a world-historic e…
> In the 70s people were saying that we needed to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world based on geography in order to prevent future catastrophe. What is this referring to?
Erlich (and others) said that we needed to do the following
* programs of mass sterilization in the third world
* a "triage" program where we partition the third world into "savable" and "unsavable" zones, block all movement between these zones, and expel the unsavable zones from our world order such that they will simply all starve to death.
By 2075, Medicare and Social Security will reach a over 14% of GDP combined, up from around 8% today. To pay that, we'll have to raise taxes by $1.75 trillion using today's GDP figures. That will require just about doubling payroll taxes from the present level. That's probably an underestimate. As population shrinks, GDP will shrink as well, unless we have large gains in productivity, which have stalled. It's not cle…
I agree with your observations. The future will not be as bright as the past, the population boom was already squeezed for the gains. Immigration at the levels needed to change this are unpalatable to most electorates, and with total fertility rate dropping across the world, it's important to be mindful that net migration to Earth is 0 (slide 39). As the economic future deteriorates due to the ever increasing drag of…
All that said, I agree with your general point that the situation with the welfare state is probably fixable, if we don’t enter a doom loop. It’s just more burdensome than lifting the SS cap.
I’m more optimistic about non-western countries. I suspect descendants of Puritans will be a historical curiosity in 2500 but I think Muslims and Mormons will still exist.