Everybody knows about the decline in birthrates. Fewer people understand why—or just how significantly it could transform society in the next few decades.
Why not ask women? Like just survey women directly why they aren't getting married and having kids...it's crazy how every article I see is just men hypothesizing instead of asking the source.
Many women will give you the same response - they cannot find men with similar levels of education attainment and income potential to partner with. Now that women have access to education, capital, and contraception, they control their own fertility. They'd rather not partner than partner with men who do not view them as equals. Those middle-class suburban couples who are actually having kids? Poll the men on their views of women and how they split parenting responsibilities and I think you'd find the recipe to success...
Until men view women as equals, this crisis will continue!
The reasons people give in surveys like are probably of that reliable, given the variables involved. It would be a good data point but not the whole answer.
The examples of Japan and Catalan are somewhat alarming to me. "This is not about bringing in a few immigrants. This is about changing your country. That country will not be Japan." This seems to uncritically accept an argument that a country is comprised not of a shared culture or shared ideology but of a shared ethnicity. "Japan" is a varied set of cultural norms and contradictions spanning language, art, architecture, history, religion, social norms, foods, traditions, ways of being - there is no reason why any white or brown or whatever person couldn't be part of "Japan" unless Japan is ONLY an ethnic category. It seems bad to hear someone way "this is about not having a country anymore" and defend them as being totally reasonable and not racist or anti-immigrant.
The example of Catalan as a language dying in the following paragraph is also interesting - "if you're a native Catalan speaker, this is existential" no its not. You can still speak Catalan, you can teach your kids Catalan, you can start an after-school program where everyone speaks Catalan if you think its an important part of the culture you want to preserve. Immigrants don't threaten that. No one is "killing" Catalan (at least, not that I know of - maybe Spain has programs akin to the way the US deliberately tried to destroy our indigenous languages and cultures. In which case, I'd say that's a problem that has little to do with birth rates). It feels like the guest is defending a lot of mundanely racist attitudes while handwaving with a "I'm not against immigration, it's not about being anti-immigrant".
I just thought it was interesting that I read all of that, feeling increasingly that the guest was blithely making a lot of unproven and (imo) harmful and hidden assertions, and Thompson's first reply is "You're making what seems to be an almost mathematical point."
Much of the piece is about culture, it feels like its trying to prove that falling fertility rates leads to a destruction of culture. The economic side is perhaps easier to defend (if you assume that the basic logic of our economy is unchangeable, which I think is a bad assumption but always seems to be the case in pieces about birth rates). I don't think the goal of the piece was to convince me that falling birth rates are bad per se (moreso trying to convince me that the fall is bigger than I think) but not only did it *not* convince me that falling birth rates are bad, it convinced me further that people who are very worried about "birth rates" are also worried about a lot of things I'd consider to be goofy racism (and goofy anti-feminism, too, but this piece addresses those "concerns" just fine).
Culture and ethnicity overlap. I, an American not of Japanese descent, would love to live in Japan and if I did I would bring my culture to Japan. I would learn some of Japanese culture but it would be relatively superficial. If millions of people like me moved to Japan then you betcha the culture would change.
That said, the idea of immigration keeping countries around the same population is ultimately a fallacy, at least with all countries doing that. There probably will be a few countries that benefit more from immigration but not too many, and fewer and fewer as time passes.
On the Japan point. If you slowly introduce outsiders, you can maintain the original culture. If you rapidly introduce outsiders, the culture of the outsiders begins to dilute the Japanese culture.
"200 years Japan will be 5% Japanese and 95% non-Japanese"
This prediction sounds like a pace at which the current culture of Japan would be significantly changed.
Could be! But culture is not a natural force. It's a set of human practices. Americans get mad about immigration when immigrants don't "assimilate" but then also get mad when you try to spend government money do to anything - including the kinds of programs that teach immigrants English language, programs that make American cultural practices more accessible and visible for everyone. We're chockablock with Roman Statue avatars on twitter run by people who fight every bit of museum funding tooth-and-nail, and then lament how people don't appreciate Western culture.
My point - in this reply, and on the whole - is just that there are a lot of assumptions being smuggled in when we're talking about these issues. Clearly you, Thompson, Fernández-Villaverde, and many others in these replies think there is an implicit, obvious connection between ethnicity and culture. I think it's a coincidence - people historically lived in groups of shared ethnicity, which then developed shared culture, so those cultures are tied to those ethnicities, but that's not a scientific connection. There's no reason that a white person (or a black person) can't fully assimilate into Japanese culture, other than racism (which I mean as neutrally as possible - Japan is famously hostile to outsiders). How much immigrants assimilate into a culture is subject to policy choices at least as much as its subject to economic realities or whatever else.
The Catalan part is such a weird rabbit hole for his wider point. Catalan would have issues with cultural change even if there was zero immigration due to being part of Spain. This is the same thing that happens across Europe when a region's language or dialect is distinct from the national lingua franca. It's why certain regional Italian words are used more in the US now than in Italy since 19th-century Italian immigrants brought their pre-unification dialects to the US, while Italians who stayed in Italy had to adapt to Florentine Italian becoming the de facto national language. Meanwhile, the US is the most culturally influential country in history. There's zero chance people will stop speaking English as the primary language in the US due to some immigration from Mexico.
I'm still not convinced. I see the world more crowded than ever before, and in that context people are having fewer children. Normal response. To those who say this creates a problem in 200 years - well that's just because you don't you expect the fertility rate to change again in response to falling population. Why? That logic sounds wrong.
Fertility is probably somewhat thermostatic to population levels. Or at least, when we have failed to create the housing, university spots, etc for more population, don't expect people to run into a wall at full speed by continuing to reproduce at high numbers.
Most projections I see have a higher population in 2100 than we have now. Hardly feels like a crisis. People try to make a global warming analogy, but no it is much easier to change direction on fertility than to remove tons of CO2 from the atmosphere!
BTW, I remember when the world population was "only" 4 to 5 billion people. It was fine! The quick mention of the environmental benefits of lower population deserved more discussion. Climate forecasts project a loss of farmland and a reduced carrying capacity for the planet. Spending some time at lower numbers could really lighten the impact we are having - let some forests grow back and give the planet a moment to breathe.
We also have to consider -- could the percent of the world that is habitable for humans (in a desirable way, not just a forced to live there way) go down enough that a smaller population still feels normal? If we get to a place where rising temperatures or sea levels (on the order of decades) forces people to congregate more inland or in temperate areas, then having fewer people to have to smush together might be a good thing.
Generally good article. I was really hoping for a little more depth on the causes, though. We got a list of possibilities, but not much on the evidence for/against each, or the correlations with actual fertility patterns.
(Also, nitpicking a bit: Talking about what the world will look like in 200 years based on today's trends is silly. Two hundred years ago, the latest word on population growth and fertility was Thomas Malthus, and he had good data to back up his arguments. But two centuries of technological and social change overwhelmed the patterns he saw and turned him into a laughingstock. There's no reason to expect we'll fare much better.)
Have we considered kids aren’t as fun anymore with technology? They stare at phones all day. Talk back. Lotta people realized vacations are better without kids. As are weekends. Might be overthinking the room.
People aren’t having kids, or as many kids, because they know how hard it is to raise them! And how much more labor intensive and time consuming it is to raise a modern child, who needs to be supported at least through college, than it was to raise one that could be put to work on the farm at age 7 or so.
Before anyone comes at me with torches and pitchforks, no, I’m not advocating going back to the bad old days of child labor and corporal punishment. But we’ve taken childrearing so far in the other direction, I’ve heard it referred to as “white knuckle parenting.” Kids need to be helicoptered, cosseted, car-seated, college-educated, driven around to enrichment activities - in other words, they’ve gone from “we’re going to have a family” to “all-encompassing, all-consuming *calling*.”
Not to mention all the fun stories you get to hear, and this was on forums and listservs and Usenet before it became Google Groups: “My husband and I had a baby, and now we’re both on anti-depressants, we had to have marriage counseling because our marriage was going down the shitter, oh and we have NO TIME for anything but work and kid.” That does not sound fun or fulfilling or even tolerable! Very few people would *sincerely* say that It’s All Worth It.
One potential development that was not covered was the possibility of increased fertility for older women through IVF, which would make today's estimate of TFR a bit on the low side.
Also, I'd love to know the professor's view on urban vs. suburban vs. rural. I'd guess that declining population would mean greater value in city living. Large cities will maintain their "pubs" and schools and hospitals.
Births by IVF are included in TFR. It's not a large factor; IVF has been around for awhile and isn't getting much better in terms of success rates. More importantly, this idea ignores that people are *choosing* not to get pregnant. Why now choose needles & surgeries over natural conception?
He says a bit about this when (sort of) defining total fertility:
> The total fertility rate is an estimate. It’s slightly different from what we call completed fertility. Completed fertility is when I go back to women who are already 50 years old and see how many kids they actually had. The problem with completed fertility, which is what we really care about in the very long run, is that by definition it takes decades before we can compute it. So if we are going to make any forecast about the future, we cannot rely on completed fertility.
The problem makes sense: we can only reliably measure completed fertility for women born as late as ~1980. But, I think it's worth pointing out that this completed fertility has changed very little in the USA since 1950. Back then it was 2.02 children per 45 year old woman, and now it is 2.05 children per 40 year old woman (https://www.humanfertility.org/File/GetDocument/Files/USA/20260323/USAtfrVH.txt -- sorry, viewing this may require an account, but you can set one up in a minute or two).
AFAIK, total fertility rate is computed in a pretty straightforward way: you break typical childbearing years into five year chunks, then take historical rates for each, multiple by populations, and sum. But the choice of rate is a big one! If you take a modern 25 year old and assume that at 35 she will behave like a 35 year old in 1980, well, that's an assumption. But if women are just delaying rather than foregoing kids, it's going to drastically underestimate the true number of lifetime children.
I'm sure the true research picture is more complicated, but I wish the interview would have justified these predictions more instead of jumping to scary conclusions.
(A brief follow-up: there appears to be at least a few lines of work that make this argument using phrases like "tempo distortion", so I don't want to claim that the demography literature is dumb or anything, but I am genuinely kind of confused about why this issue isn't better highlighted.)
Humans are funny. We HAVE to find THE REASON as if that would instantly solve the problem. Rather than spending time and effort building resilient economic models that would not suffer from the loss of abundant cheap labor and an ever growing consuming class, we bemoan the lowering birthrates. Most of our socio-economic systems will suffer tremendously as the number of humans decline. While AI might displace the needs for a lot of workers, it accrues financial benefits only to those who are very wealthy already. Universal Basic Income trials have repeatedly demonstrated that humans use that financial cushion to do things like have children, spend time with their families, pursue education, arts, or building businesses. Paid for with taxes on AI, let the AI pay the same employment taxes for each displaced worker (healthcare premiums, Social Security, Fed, State and Local Taxes, Medicare) for 15 years after the workers displaced. The companies will still adopt AI, their ROI is simply a bit longer) but we’d have plenty of money to pay for UBI. The wealthy can’t really even complain that the AI paying taxes would harm them, it just makes them a little bit less wealthy.
People used to be optimistic about the future. I don't think anyone really is anymore. If AI doesn't completely obliterate human society, then climate change, war (obviously war is far from new but it's on another level of devastation now), disease or some other crisis probably will. I don't have a 401K because my 65th birthday isn't until 2059 and the idea that the world of 2059 will be one where my 401K matters at all is completely ridiculous to me.
But I'm sure my parents and grandparents thought the same thing at some point. My doomerism is mostly about AI and advanced robotics. I really do believe both have the potential to change the world so rapidly and so thoroughly that no human, even the powerful ones, will be able to keep up.
"People used to be optimistic about the future" - can we test this? I recall the 70s being economically terrible (nevermind Vietnam and Watergate) and the 80s being a consistent fear of nuclear armageddon. The 90s were fun, except AIDS I suppose. The 2000s we all got scared of terrorism.
I'm just saying, I don't believe all the nostalgia. I think the post-war baby boom might be a good example that fits your story, but in general there have always been big worries. Media negativity is part of it, I suspect.
There is a long history of people predicting new technology will ruin the world and a long history of new technology having pros and cons but nominally increasing the standard of living.
I feel like the mere existence of the Erlich book referenced in the article would tend to disprove your assertion of general optimism about the future.
I know the “nothing matters except fertility and AI” comment is a little hyperbolic on purpose, but it’s interesting that he holds that view without much moderation on what the future will look like because of AI. If you’re thinking about 2100 at all, you’re probably in the “AI as Normal Technology” school of thought. That’s a completely reasonable place to land, but also supports that there might be other interesting things going on the world besides AI.
I've seen conflicting reports about the decline in sperm count, testosterone, and the possible impacts of PFAS on fertility. Could these also be playing into societal/economic factors?
I though declining births corresponded with the huge decline in teenage pregnancies in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a worldwide trend too.
Of course, that could be just another false data point just like those old alarms on the world getting overpopulated.
All that said, the article was very thought provoking.
It seems a bit odd to highlight the huge errors in demographic projections made a few decades ago and then try to extrapolate current trends decades or even centuries into the future. Especially when you include AI in the mix. If we just focus on the next five to ten years, what’s the balance of positive and negative implications?
Every place I go in California seems so crowded now. And after supposedly losing population! I don’t even think I’ll be able to go to Yosemite etc… ever again. Too crowded. Housing is now so expensive even where my family lives in an economically -depressed area in Mass. And despite huge housing shortages, most Americans seem keen to allow mass immigration to continue. So, although I’m being willfully obtuse saying this (because I understand economic implications), it’s hard to CARE at all about the idea that the population could decrease. Of course I wish only smart, kind people with enlightenment values and love of democracy, free speech, liberty, and free markets would reproduce and raise children. 🤷🏻♀️
I think you have failed to consider increases in life span. What does it do to the model if AI is able to address chronic diseases such as heart disease, blood pressure, diabetes and cancer. It might be interesting to see what happens if humans live a year longer, two years longer or maybe ten years longer?? What does that do to the model? Will we become a society where a smaller and smaller young population is asked to support generations that die in their 90s and not early 80s? We are already experiencing generational resentment (we will never own a house. Ours is the first generation to be less well off than the last). This may not be the population bomb but will surely be the population gimp as my generation limps into older age hoping that their grandchildren or great grandchildren value them enough to keep them afloat!
Call me a horrible person who does not think Life Is Preshus (tm), but increasing lifespan without increasing “health span” and/or “youth span” is not sustainable. What is the point of living longer, being cured of cancer, etc. if you’re still frail and in need of vast amounts of care? Just adding years is not enough.
Now if people lived longer *and healthier* and were able to work that would be entirely different and all to the good, although the inevitable cries of “but it’s a zero sum world and we’re full” would arise.
This is kind of a bummer. Entire families evaporating because no one has kids. Holidays must be incredibly depressing with no cousins and no "kids table" off to the side.
Why not ask women? Like just survey women directly why they aren't getting married and having kids...it's crazy how every article I see is just men hypothesizing instead of asking the source.
Many women will give you the same response - they cannot find men with similar levels of education attainment and income potential to partner with. Now that women have access to education, capital, and contraception, they control their own fertility. They'd rather not partner than partner with men who do not view them as equals. Those middle-class suburban couples who are actually having kids? Poll the men on their views of women and how they split parenting responsibilities and I think you'd find the recipe to success...
Until men view women as equals, this crisis will continue!
The reasons people give in surveys like are probably of that reliable, given the variables involved. It would be a good data point but not the whole answer.
The examples of Japan and Catalan are somewhat alarming to me. "This is not about bringing in a few immigrants. This is about changing your country. That country will not be Japan." This seems to uncritically accept an argument that a country is comprised not of a shared culture or shared ideology but of a shared ethnicity. "Japan" is a varied set of cultural norms and contradictions spanning language, art, architecture, history, religion, social norms, foods, traditions, ways of being - there is no reason why any white or brown or whatever person couldn't be part of "Japan" unless Japan is ONLY an ethnic category. It seems bad to hear someone way "this is about not having a country anymore" and defend them as being totally reasonable and not racist or anti-immigrant.
The example of Catalan as a language dying in the following paragraph is also interesting - "if you're a native Catalan speaker, this is existential" no its not. You can still speak Catalan, you can teach your kids Catalan, you can start an after-school program where everyone speaks Catalan if you think its an important part of the culture you want to preserve. Immigrants don't threaten that. No one is "killing" Catalan (at least, not that I know of - maybe Spain has programs akin to the way the US deliberately tried to destroy our indigenous languages and cultures. In which case, I'd say that's a problem that has little to do with birth rates). It feels like the guest is defending a lot of mundanely racist attitudes while handwaving with a "I'm not against immigration, it's not about being anti-immigrant".
I just thought it was interesting that I read all of that, feeling increasingly that the guest was blithely making a lot of unproven and (imo) harmful and hidden assertions, and Thompson's first reply is "You're making what seems to be an almost mathematical point."
Much of the piece is about culture, it feels like its trying to prove that falling fertility rates leads to a destruction of culture. The economic side is perhaps easier to defend (if you assume that the basic logic of our economy is unchangeable, which I think is a bad assumption but always seems to be the case in pieces about birth rates). I don't think the goal of the piece was to convince me that falling birth rates are bad per se (moreso trying to convince me that the fall is bigger than I think) but not only did it *not* convince me that falling birth rates are bad, it convinced me further that people who are very worried about "birth rates" are also worried about a lot of things I'd consider to be goofy racism (and goofy anti-feminism, too, but this piece addresses those "concerns" just fine).
Culture and ethnicity overlap. I, an American not of Japanese descent, would love to live in Japan and if I did I would bring my culture to Japan. I would learn some of Japanese culture but it would be relatively superficial. If millions of people like me moved to Japan then you betcha the culture would change.
That said, the idea of immigration keeping countries around the same population is ultimately a fallacy, at least with all countries doing that. There probably will be a few countries that benefit more from immigration but not too many, and fewer and fewer as time passes.
On the Japan point. If you slowly introduce outsiders, you can maintain the original culture. If you rapidly introduce outsiders, the culture of the outsiders begins to dilute the Japanese culture.
"200 years Japan will be 5% Japanese and 95% non-Japanese"
This prediction sounds like a pace at which the current culture of Japan would be significantly changed.
Could be! But culture is not a natural force. It's a set of human practices. Americans get mad about immigration when immigrants don't "assimilate" but then also get mad when you try to spend government money do to anything - including the kinds of programs that teach immigrants English language, programs that make American cultural practices more accessible and visible for everyone. We're chockablock with Roman Statue avatars on twitter run by people who fight every bit of museum funding tooth-and-nail, and then lament how people don't appreciate Western culture.
My point - in this reply, and on the whole - is just that there are a lot of assumptions being smuggled in when we're talking about these issues. Clearly you, Thompson, Fernández-Villaverde, and many others in these replies think there is an implicit, obvious connection between ethnicity and culture. I think it's a coincidence - people historically lived in groups of shared ethnicity, which then developed shared culture, so those cultures are tied to those ethnicities, but that's not a scientific connection. There's no reason that a white person (or a black person) can't fully assimilate into Japanese culture, other than racism (which I mean as neutrally as possible - Japan is famously hostile to outsiders). How much immigrants assimilate into a culture is subject to policy choices at least as much as its subject to economic realities or whatever else.
The Catalan part is such a weird rabbit hole for his wider point. Catalan would have issues with cultural change even if there was zero immigration due to being part of Spain. This is the same thing that happens across Europe when a region's language or dialect is distinct from the national lingua franca. It's why certain regional Italian words are used more in the US now than in Italy since 19th-century Italian immigrants brought their pre-unification dialects to the US, while Italians who stayed in Italy had to adapt to Florentine Italian becoming the de facto national language. Meanwhile, the US is the most culturally influential country in history. There's zero chance people will stop speaking English as the primary language in the US due to some immigration from Mexico.
I'm still not convinced. I see the world more crowded than ever before, and in that context people are having fewer children. Normal response. To those who say this creates a problem in 200 years - well that's just because you don't you expect the fertility rate to change again in response to falling population. Why? That logic sounds wrong.
Fertility is probably somewhat thermostatic to population levels. Or at least, when we have failed to create the housing, university spots, etc for more population, don't expect people to run into a wall at full speed by continuing to reproduce at high numbers.
Most projections I see have a higher population in 2100 than we have now. Hardly feels like a crisis. People try to make a global warming analogy, but no it is much easier to change direction on fertility than to remove tons of CO2 from the atmosphere!
BTW, I remember when the world population was "only" 4 to 5 billion people. It was fine! The quick mention of the environmental benefits of lower population deserved more discussion. Climate forecasts project a loss of farmland and a reduced carrying capacity for the planet. Spending some time at lower numbers could really lighten the impact we are having - let some forests grow back and give the planet a moment to breathe.
We also have to consider -- could the percent of the world that is habitable for humans (in a desirable way, not just a forced to live there way) go down enough that a smaller population still feels normal? If we get to a place where rising temperatures or sea levels (on the order of decades) forces people to congregate more inland or in temperate areas, then having fewer people to have to smush together might be a good thing.
Generally good article. I was really hoping for a little more depth on the causes, though. We got a list of possibilities, but not much on the evidence for/against each, or the correlations with actual fertility patterns.
(Also, nitpicking a bit: Talking about what the world will look like in 200 years based on today's trends is silly. Two hundred years ago, the latest word on population growth and fertility was Thomas Malthus, and he had good data to back up his arguments. But two centuries of technological and social change overwhelmed the patterns he saw and turned him into a laughingstock. There's no reason to expect we'll fare much better.)
Have we considered kids aren’t as fun anymore with technology? They stare at phones all day. Talk back. Lotta people realized vacations are better without kids. As are weekends. Might be overthinking the room.
Before ton of people like this - i have kids and love them very much . 23 year old hates technology - delight. 9 year old daughter might as well
be on Bravo. All love most are jokes. Great Read thanks Derek. ⚡️🌲
People aren’t having kids, or as many kids, because they know how hard it is to raise them! And how much more labor intensive and time consuming it is to raise a modern child, who needs to be supported at least through college, than it was to raise one that could be put to work on the farm at age 7 or so.
Before anyone comes at me with torches and pitchforks, no, I’m not advocating going back to the bad old days of child labor and corporal punishment. But we’ve taken childrearing so far in the other direction, I’ve heard it referred to as “white knuckle parenting.” Kids need to be helicoptered, cosseted, car-seated, college-educated, driven around to enrichment activities - in other words, they’ve gone from “we’re going to have a family” to “all-encompassing, all-consuming *calling*.”
Not to mention all the fun stories you get to hear, and this was on forums and listservs and Usenet before it became Google Groups: “My husband and I had a baby, and now we’re both on anti-depressants, we had to have marriage counseling because our marriage was going down the shitter, oh and we have NO TIME for anything but work and kid.” That does not sound fun or fulfilling or even tolerable! Very few people would *sincerely* say that It’s All Worth It.
Great interview.
One potential development that was not covered was the possibility of increased fertility for older women through IVF, which would make today's estimate of TFR a bit on the low side.
Also, I'd love to know the professor's view on urban vs. suburban vs. rural. I'd guess that declining population would mean greater value in city living. Large cities will maintain their "pubs" and schools and hospitals.
Births by IVF are included in TFR. It's not a large factor; IVF has been around for awhile and isn't getting much better in terms of success rates. More importantly, this idea ignores that people are *choosing* not to get pregnant. Why now choose needles & surgeries over natural conception?
Great post btw, fascinating stuff.
He says a bit about this when (sort of) defining total fertility:
> The total fertility rate is an estimate. It’s slightly different from what we call completed fertility. Completed fertility is when I go back to women who are already 50 years old and see how many kids they actually had. The problem with completed fertility, which is what we really care about in the very long run, is that by definition it takes decades before we can compute it. So if we are going to make any forecast about the future, we cannot rely on completed fertility.
The problem makes sense: we can only reliably measure completed fertility for women born as late as ~1980. But, I think it's worth pointing out that this completed fertility has changed very little in the USA since 1950. Back then it was 2.02 children per 45 year old woman, and now it is 2.05 children per 40 year old woman (https://www.humanfertility.org/File/GetDocument/Files/USA/20260323/USAtfrVH.txt -- sorry, viewing this may require an account, but you can set one up in a minute or two).
AFAIK, total fertility rate is computed in a pretty straightforward way: you break typical childbearing years into five year chunks, then take historical rates for each, multiple by populations, and sum. But the choice of rate is a big one! If you take a modern 25 year old and assume that at 35 she will behave like a 35 year old in 1980, well, that's an assumption. But if women are just delaying rather than foregoing kids, it's going to drastically underestimate the true number of lifetime children.
I'm sure the true research picture is more complicated, but I wish the interview would have justified these predictions more instead of jumping to scary conclusions.
I agree. If women are indeed going to have children later then the completed fertility in the future could be higher than the TFR estimated today.
(A brief follow-up: there appears to be at least a few lines of work that make this argument using phrases like "tempo distortion", so I don't want to claim that the demography literature is dumb or anything, but I am genuinely kind of confused about why this issue isn't better highlighted.)
Humans are funny. We HAVE to find THE REASON as if that would instantly solve the problem. Rather than spending time and effort building resilient economic models that would not suffer from the loss of abundant cheap labor and an ever growing consuming class, we bemoan the lowering birthrates. Most of our socio-economic systems will suffer tremendously as the number of humans decline. While AI might displace the needs for a lot of workers, it accrues financial benefits only to those who are very wealthy already. Universal Basic Income trials have repeatedly demonstrated that humans use that financial cushion to do things like have children, spend time with their families, pursue education, arts, or building businesses. Paid for with taxes on AI, let the AI pay the same employment taxes for each displaced worker (healthcare premiums, Social Security, Fed, State and Local Taxes, Medicare) for 15 years after the workers displaced. The companies will still adopt AI, their ROI is simply a bit longer) but we’d have plenty of money to pay for UBI. The wealthy can’t really even complain that the AI paying taxes would harm them, it just makes them a little bit less wealthy.
People used to be optimistic about the future. I don't think anyone really is anymore. If AI doesn't completely obliterate human society, then climate change, war (obviously war is far from new but it's on another level of devastation now), disease or some other crisis probably will. I don't have a 401K because my 65th birthday isn't until 2059 and the idea that the world of 2059 will be one where my 401K matters at all is completely ridiculous to me.
But I'm sure my parents and grandparents thought the same thing at some point. My doomerism is mostly about AI and advanced robotics. I really do believe both have the potential to change the world so rapidly and so thoroughly that no human, even the powerful ones, will be able to keep up.
"People used to be optimistic about the future" - can we test this? I recall the 70s being economically terrible (nevermind Vietnam and Watergate) and the 80s being a consistent fear of nuclear armageddon. The 90s were fun, except AIDS I suppose. The 2000s we all got scared of terrorism.
I'm just saying, I don't believe all the nostalgia. I think the post-war baby boom might be a good example that fits your story, but in general there have always been big worries. Media negativity is part of it, I suspect.
There is a long history of people predicting new technology will ruin the world and a long history of new technology having pros and cons but nominally increasing the standard of living.
And that might happen again with AI. I'm not saying it won't. But I do think that there's a good chance that this is just fundamentally different.
I feel like the mere existence of the Erlich book referenced in the article would tend to disprove your assertion of general optimism about the future.
I know the “nothing matters except fertility and AI” comment is a little hyperbolic on purpose, but it’s interesting that he holds that view without much moderation on what the future will look like because of AI. If you’re thinking about 2100 at all, you’re probably in the “AI as Normal Technology” school of thought. That’s a completely reasonable place to land, but also supports that there might be other interesting things going on the world besides AI.
I've seen conflicting reports about the decline in sperm count, testosterone, and the possible impacts of PFAS on fertility. Could these also be playing into societal/economic factors?
I though declining births corresponded with the huge decline in teenage pregnancies in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a worldwide trend too.
Of course, that could be just another false data point just like those old alarms on the world getting overpopulated.
All that said, the article was very thought provoking.
It seems a bit odd to highlight the huge errors in demographic projections made a few decades ago and then try to extrapolate current trends decades or even centuries into the future. Especially when you include AI in the mix. If we just focus on the next five to ten years, what’s the balance of positive and negative implications?
Every place I go in California seems so crowded now. And after supposedly losing population! I don’t even think I’ll be able to go to Yosemite etc… ever again. Too crowded. Housing is now so expensive even where my family lives in an economically -depressed area in Mass. And despite huge housing shortages, most Americans seem keen to allow mass immigration to continue. So, although I’m being willfully obtuse saying this (because I understand economic implications), it’s hard to CARE at all about the idea that the population could decrease. Of course I wish only smart, kind people with enlightenment values and love of democracy, free speech, liberty, and free markets would reproduce and raise children. 🤷🏻♀️
I think you have failed to consider increases in life span. What does it do to the model if AI is able to address chronic diseases such as heart disease, blood pressure, diabetes and cancer. It might be interesting to see what happens if humans live a year longer, two years longer or maybe ten years longer?? What does that do to the model? Will we become a society where a smaller and smaller young population is asked to support generations that die in their 90s and not early 80s? We are already experiencing generational resentment (we will never own a house. Ours is the first generation to be less well off than the last). This may not be the population bomb but will surely be the population gimp as my generation limps into older age hoping that their grandchildren or great grandchildren value them enough to keep them afloat!
Call me a horrible person who does not think Life Is Preshus (tm), but increasing lifespan without increasing “health span” and/or “youth span” is not sustainable. What is the point of living longer, being cured of cancer, etc. if you’re still frail and in need of vast amounts of care? Just adding years is not enough.
Now if people lived longer *and healthier* and were able to work that would be entirely different and all to the good, although the inevitable cries of “but it’s a zero sum world and we’re full” would arise.
This is kind of a bummer. Entire families evaporating because no one has kids. Holidays must be incredibly depressing with no cousins and no "kids table" off to the side.