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The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

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Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#171

Post by WalterBright »

worik wrote: post #166
WalterBright wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves. Historically that's never been a requirement for people to make children. Poor people have tended to be pretty prolific. > hoarding more and more of the wealth In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".

> In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated" That is incorrect In a free market wealth has a definite tendency to clump together, to concentrate. A moment's thought will make clear why.

> A moment's thought will make clear why.

Take a moment and elaborate, please.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#172

Post by fuzzfactor »

TrackerFF wrote: post #38

Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly living off their state pension. As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous o…

>I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people.

In South Florida it's always been like that or more.

No imagination required :)

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#173

Post by WalterBright »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #167
WalterBright wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk's wealth was transferred from nobody. It was created. When wealth gets "moved around", that is not the market doing that. It's force. Like social security payments. That's why I prefaced it with "free market".

Maybe a startup can have a high valuation for a while and ultimately be worth nothing. Maybe that has happened. Maybe Musk will turn out to have created 10x more wealth than he has now. Maybe he will screw up and go broke. Maybe both. Where did Bernie Madoff's wealth come from before he got caught? Where did Sam Bankman-Fried's wealth come from? We can't just point to a unit of wealth and automatically applaud its le…

Bernie Madoff defrauded people by selling them fake investments.

Note that I remarked that free markets did not include fraud.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#174

Post by worik »

testing22321 wrote: post #102
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a few of them in Nigeria? On satellite imaging, from what I've seen, they're not so massive, and they're mostly comprised of a sprawl of 1-3 story buildings. We can compare vs. cities that we have good numbers for. Or Chinese/Indian cities, for that matter. (After looking at Nigeria or the DRC, a quick glance at India via satellite imaging is shocking .) That said, Egypt is very populous, there's no doub…

I drove through at least 10 cities in Nigeria I’ve never heard of that had tons of buildings over 10 stories. I just took the fastest route across, I didn’t go wandering. This was 10 years ago too. Also remember the DRC is almost a million square miles. So it’s 1.5x Alaska.

Sigh.

Personal experience Vs. looking at pictures from the basement....

I expect it to be USA policy soon.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#175

Post by WalterBright »

worik wrote: post #170
WalterBright wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fact, not a theory. The wealth in the economy did not exist 100 years ago. Therefore it must have been created. And where did Musk's money come from? Who did he transfer it from?

> And where did Musk's money come from? No body (?) is contending that in a free market wealth is not created. The contention is that when wealth is created it tends to head to other wealth. When a bank lends capital and has a choice of lending to, say, Elon Musk or me, I think the bank will make that rational choice and lend to Elon. Thus once you have some wealth attracting more wealth is less difficult than from b…

Lending money is not transferring wealth, nor is it creating wealth. It nets out to zero.

This is clear when one does accounting. Accounting is based on the idea that (Equity = Assets - Liabilities). When one takes out a loan, the assets go up by the amount of the loan, and the liabilities also go up by the amount of the loan. The Equity stays the same. That this balances out is literally called "balancing the books".

BTW, banks are happy to lend out money to people that have a track record of paying it back. This includes poor people. Poor people have credit cards, too, which is how they borrow money.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#176

Post by lurk2 »

worik wrote: post #162
lurk2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves. National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.

> the average number of years a woman spends being educated; Have you a recent reference for that? I think even that correlation has broken down, but I do not know

I don’t have any structured references saved, sorry.

My understanding is that the only real correlation is years in education, but this is at the national level; the very rich and very poor (which imperfectly correlates with level of education attained) tend to have more children than the middle class, but fertility rates are down across every income level. What this means is that if you look at two countries and see that one has a higher level of education than the other, you would expect the country with the higher level of education to have a lower fertility rate, but within both countries you would expect to see a relatively uniform decline in fertility across every income level, with a more pronounced decline around middle income levels.

This is maybe what’s being referenced when people saying they’ll have kids when capitalism gets sorted, but this isn’t seen in countries where standards of living have improved considerably.

The simplest theory is that more people are using contraceptives because they simply don’t want children. Some people might subjectively feel like they can’t afford to have children, but by world historical (and contemporary) standards of living this argument looks incredibly silly.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#177

Post by worik »

churchill wrote: post #116
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #85

I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong. The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is…

Thank you for this. Nigerian here, and I have to say that you hit the nail squarely on the head. Population counts in Nigeria are deeply political and essentially every region/state is motivated to fake/overestimate their headcount to get a bigger chunk of the oil revenue, which is pretty much the most significant slice of gov. revenue. But, once you dig into the figures, you realize it'd be a miracle if Nigeria has…

Even better personal experience

You estimate a factor of two for over estimate, believable, but higher than I would have thought. Makes sense with the context of getting more revenue. Thank you

I caution you against the "I looked at satellite image" nonsense. Your lived experience is very valuable. Looking at a satellite image is not

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#178

Post by pmarreck »

Maybe expecting every single person to work and no one to homestead and care for the kids, within a system that explicitly does not support families, was a mistake. (Please note that I did not gender the roles. My best friend is a stay-at-home dad and he is amazing. They can afford to do this, though, because his wife's compensation is extremely high.)

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#179

Post by dzdt »

worik wrote: post #162
lurk2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves. National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.

> the average number of years a woman spends being educated; Have you a recent reference for that? I think even that correlation has broken down, but I do not know

The main researchers associated here are Samir KC and Wolfgan Lutz. Their latest update (with a long list of coauthors) is from 2024 [1]; this is a followup of the important 2013 paper [2].

[1] https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/19487/1/WP-24-003.pdf

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2344470

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#180

Post by oh_my_goodness »

WalterBright wrote: post #173
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a startup can have a high valuation for a while and ultimately be worth nothing. Maybe that has happened. Maybe Musk will turn out to have created 10x more wealth than he has now. Maybe he will screw up and go broke. Maybe both. Where did Bernie Madoff's wealth come from before he got caught? Where did Sam Bankman-Fried's wealth come from? We can't just point to a unit of wealth and automatically applaud its le…

Bernie Madoff defrauded people by selling them fake investments. Note that I remarked that free markets did not include fraud.

Excluding fraud, theft, and so forth, just by definition, means we're talking about a utopia. It's not a system, it's some beautiful subset of what's really going on. The subset would have to be carefully selected, using information we don't actually have until (maybe) much later. Maybe never.

This 'free market' is a bit like clean matter-antimatter power stations. They sound like a great idea. We could build them if we knew how.

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