Getting people to have more kids in a modern industrial/service economy means persuading them to have kids.
There seem to be two relatively effective approaches to this: one is patriarchy, ie pushing women out of the workforce to have and raise children, structuring the economy so that a single income is sufficient to support a household, making dual-income households rare, keeping (male) unemployment low, etc. This worked well in the US in the 1950s, leading to the Baby Boom. There were similar booms during les trente glorieuses and the Wirtschaftswunder (ie the 1950s and 1960s) in France and Germany.
I don't think this approach is socially acceptable now; any politician who proposed it would be driven out of office. It's worth noting that right-wing religious political parties have lots of senior women in them now - the Dutch SGP abandoned its long-standing opposition to women's suffrage in 2017, and started running women as candidates for political office the following year. Less explicitly religious parties of the right, like the French RN or the German AfD have plenty of senior women (the RN, of course, is led by Marine Le Pen). Similarly, leading figures of the right-wing within the US Republican Party (there isn't a formal leadership of the faction) are often women, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert - or Sarah Palin a generation ago.
The alternative approach is to ensure that working women are able to raise children, what we might call the "Nordic" approach. TFR in the Nordic countries is not above replacement, but it is notably higher than in most of the rest of Europe. Paid leave for parents (critically, both parents: if fathers don't take parental leave, then you create a huge incentive for employers to discriminate, which then incentivises women not to have children in order to avoid the discrimination) and high-quality childcare at affordable prices both go towards building a culture that is accepting of working women having children - which is essential if TFR is going to get back up towards replacement. France is another country with a robust TFR.
What does seem to be disastrous is for women to work but work not to be reshaped so that it is compatible with parenthood. The catastrophic TFRs of countries like Italy and Spain (so bad that even Japan looks good by comparison) seem to come from this place.
I think the explanation is actually simple in this case and can be summated into one word-“Time.”
Raising children takes time. To do it well requires tremendous sacrifice in personal time and leisure. I think many people in our present era see an opportunity cost--they can spend the ‘best years of their lives’ (i. e. 20s and 30s) indulging themselves, cultivating their careers or traveling the world OR they can start a family and have children. I think many choose the former option and only start to consider family life after they have “settled” or become “established in their careers” in their mid-30s.
At which point they are looking at a geriatric pregnancy and unlikely to have more than one, maybe two children.
Ironically, as we increase in wealth and can objectively afford to have more children, we choose not to because we would rather have our time back. I think the sacrifice in “time” to have a child is the causal factor. As we get wealthier we have more “diversions” which children pull us away from. Hence, society has less children.
We need to teach society that having children is worth your time. I have yet to meet someone who wishes they personally had less children.
I agree with everything you say, up until your last sentence. Consider that the reason you've never met anyone who wishes they had fewer children is that there's a very strong taboo against people, especially mothers, saying such a thing. A woman who says "I wish my child didn't exist" would be seen as a heartless monster. I know there are online forums where parents post their regrets anonymously, and anecdotal evidence suggests that there are people who think "I love my child, but if I could do it over again, I would not have had him/her. The cost (in time, effort, energy, sleepless nights, loss of my sense of self) is too much." And I can only imagine what some parents of children with lifelong disabilities are saying.
Love is a powerful force, but I've known people with regrets. As you note, they don't wear "take my child, please" tee shirts, but they will often admit that they wish things had been different.
I can, of course, only speak from my limited experience. But you do have to ask yourself the question: “in your old age and dotage, would you rather trust an institution/old peoples home to care for you or a child whom you raised and maintained a lifelong loving relationship with?”
I think a lot of people are pondering this question. As there are less workers--will the smaller working age generation content itself to work in retirement homes or will they seek employment in other careers? There already is a shortage of caregivers. If there are none left to care for the elderly then what can they do?
At least if you have a child of your own you can bank on someone watching over you in your old age. Has this not been the way of humanity for thousands of years? The more children you have, the more able they will be to support you as they can pool their resources and pair their efforts. I am not so sure a welfare state is equipped to handle a situation where the geriatric nearly outnumber those still in the workforce.
A lot depends on the family. Do the children have the necessary resources for that kind of care? How well does the parent get along with the children? The oldest child rarely gets along well with the same sex parent. Is there even a relationship between the parents and children? A huge number of children had wretched childhoods. One has to be a starry eyed optimist to expect one's children to care for one in one's old age. Judging from the typical family dynamics, having more children rarely helps.
There is a popular fantasy of being taken care of by one's children in one's old age, but I'd say the odds are one in five for those who had children, and it would usually involve putting a major burden on the children, usually the daughters or daughters in law. That's right. A lot of people have more than one parent, so a couple would have four. Most of the people I know are loath to place that burden on their progeny. Why screw them over after all that hard work helping them get on track? They'd rather deal with institutions.
There's also a societal cost. If you think it is hard getting care givers now, consider what happens if children were required to take care of their failing parents. To start with, it would knock a lot of women especially out of the work force, but men also have parents and not all of them are married. It would lower productivity overall since taking long term indefinite leave to take care of a parent would kill one's career. Depending on the level of care, it's hard to imagine the care taking children even holding down jobs.
Since I'm typing this on a computer, I am not all that receptive to arguments based on thousands of years of practice. You seem to be arguing for a traditional gerontocracy in which a small number of old people command the resources of large numbers of young people. That kind of society does care for the old, but it is stagnant, repressive and hard to idealize let alone consider a model for our future.
P.S. Are you familiar with the parable of the wooden trough? Those traditional societies had their discontents.
You are imputing to me an argument I did not make. I have not argued for a gerontocracy. In fact, I would argue that people should have children, lots of them and raise them in such a loving way that the children would not countenance their elderly parents being destitute.
My point is that as the size of the workforce diminishes you encounter labor induced inflation. If societies have to triage between essential services such as Fire and EMS or elderly and hospice care you are presenting the upcoming generation with very bad options. If you have one worker but need to fill a position in your fire department, your police department, retirement home or your farm you have to get very creative. The increasingly diminished workforce can charge a premium on labor.
Cost of labor will skyrocket and this is very bad for people living on fixed incomes--such as pensioners. What happens when you cannot afford elderly care and you have no living relatives? You have to trust the state to provision your care--again, those care workers will charge a premium. Programs will be insolvent and you will have to tax those in the workforce at very high rates.
None of this is a recipe for social stability. It is not a ‘catastrophe’ but it is a crisis, one best resolved by trying to foster, at a minimum, a replacement birth rate.
How do you intend to enforce "lovingly"? That's an extremely serious question. Historically, societies with large numbers of children have been repressive. To be honest, I cannot think of one that has not been. They usually completely sacrifice women and provide few protections for children. Large families have their own dynamics, and are fundamentally asymmetrical. I'm sure there have been plenty of loving families, even large ones, but it is hard to see how to enforce this as we must if this is to be a societal solution.
I appreciate your answer. If anything, it is it Dickensian. Dickens was a social reformer, and many of his books were what we would now call social problem books. What should we do about orphans? Is our criminal justice system too harsh? How important is the work / life balance? Dickens' solution almost always involves "lovingly". We need kinder, gentler workplaces, prisons, orphanages, poor farms and whatever, all appropriately perfused with love and care. Sometimes lots of children are involved. It makes for a happy ending, but it doesn't address the actual problem. Still, Dickens made a lot of people care, which is more than a lot of social reformers, but it was social reformers who did the heavy lifting.
"I'm sure there have been plenty of loving families, even large ones," - I would suggest you have a bias you need to check. - someone with 8 siblings who all love each other and their parents.
I never said that there are no loving families, just that not every family is a loving family. If you are going to make policy assuming that all families are loving, you are going to make pretty awful policy.
Maybe if the opportunity cost of taking the time to raise children was lower, more people would have them. Right now, it is an immense cost, especially as our society has bifurcated into a small group of winners and a vast majority of losers.
I once read somebody who said out on a farm, kids are an asset, because they can help with all the chores that go into keeping a farm running. But in a city, kids are a burden, so urbanization is really what makes birth rates drop.
I guess if we all move back out into the country, the opportunity cost of kids flips around and they basically become free labour.
That's a big part of it, but France had a big drop in fertility in the mid-18th century without major urbanization. It was a big enough drop that the GDP per population ratio in France was higher than that of England into the mid-19th century. France stayed relatively agricultural into the 20th century. Urbanization is a lot of it, but when Casanova starts using condoms, as he did by 1760, there are clearly other drivers.
Not having kids is for society what not eating food is for the individual. The effects of the former are just further out, but they are the same nonetheless; the death of the (social) organism. If the "common good" means anything, people have a social and moral duty to "make time" for children. Of course there are exceptions that prove the rule (the infertile etc.) If enough people won't then the society they constitute is suicidal.
I think suicidal gets the direction right, but overstates the problem. The alternative is to have a population that keeps growing and growing. If you do the math on that, you get a population in the quadrillions and there are bigger numbers than that. The alternatives are a perfectly static population which is probably unattainable in practice or accepting that the population will decrease at times. Some people argue that this should be done by unleashing the Four Horsemen and letting the corpses fall where they may. Others, like me, would prefer people simply choosing to have fewer children.
There is a countervailing force. Societies with smaller populations will have more resources for people, and that will encourage people to have children. That's what happened in the US after the Great Depression and World War II. There was a depressed birth cohort, casualties during the war and then a massive economic boom combined with pro-family policies that led to the baby boom from 1946 to 1964.
Societies that want growing populations should provide people with the necessary resources. Right now, most of them make raising children a major challenge. People have a lot of social and moral duties to society, but relying on people's better angels doesn't work. Some people argue for a punitive approach like the Roman bachelor tax or the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion. Others, like me, argue for a more positive approach based on incentives and lowering barriers.
P.S. My weight has gone up and down over the years. Sometimes I eat too much and need to cut back for a while. At other times, I just let loose and pack on the pounds. Cutting back after a period of feasting is not suicidal.
Thanks for the comments. First, I agree with pro-family policies, we need to, on a public policy level, incentivize families forming, staying together, and having and rearing children.
Three things, 1) while I do think there is a subjective element to human happiness, such as someone finding a measure of happiness in this or that hobby lifestyle or career, there are objective components. As persons who by nature can know and love, we are made for communion with other persons. Having a family that one loves and lives with is that interpersonal communion at its most essential level. Man was not made to be alone. It is also quite fantastic that what is for the common good is also what is for my or your good.
2) Pragmatically, on a secular level, I do think the answer to many of our problems is more and better raised humans. Now, I'm not saying everyone needs to have 10+ children. But people should, on average, at a minimum replace themselves. But there is room for much more. Almost an unlimited amount more. The universe is quite big. Human ingenuity and capacity for excellence can largely overcome things like food shortages. More of that will do better than less of it.
3) I don't think our birth rate is as flexible as it once was, we are dealing with anti-natalist and identity ideologies. Children are no longer seen as a gift and a blessing, full-stop, but are more seen as optional accessories and one that is increasingly frowned upon as bad for oneself, society, and the environment. Our self-identity is more inward-focused than it used to be. Modern man is first a psychological man and not someone who bases his main sense of identity in how he relates to others. A person's primary identity seems to whether he is black, gay, trans, etc., and no longer in whether he is a father, husband, member of a clan or country etc,. Identity has become inward focused and not outward focused. This will not help families form when we need it. After all, we have been not replacing ourselves for a few decades and it is only getting worse. So the problem is not overstated.
Yes, traditional/patriarchal attitudes/culture combined with allowing women to get educated and work is the worst of both worlds. Germany is another place where the schools are structured in a way where someone in the family (usually the mother) is expected to pick up the kids and feed them lunch. Obviously not compatible with many jobs.
So the only viable options are full-on patriarchy (not allowing women to work) or the Scandinavian model, which not only is allowing work with motherhood more easily but also be culturally more accepting of children born out of wedlock.
Or the French, who aren't keen on unmarried parents, but have no problem with pacsé ones. Which is their distinctively-French civil union that they fell into by accident (it was originally going to be only for gay people and was amended to allow straight people at the last minute).
The problem with patriarchy is that it removes women from the workforce for decades if not completely. Eliminating such a huge number of workers doesn't help the worker-dependent ratio or the worker-retiree ratio. That's why I suspect there is a lot of bad faith in these arguments. A lot of conservatives look at the Taliban and like what they see. Arguing about the worker-retiree ratio gives them a hook to push for those policies here. It's like the budget deficit or inflation. Whether it matters or not depends on which solutions are being proposed and less on the balance between taxes and spending or rising costs for workers versus rising costs for businesses.
It's amazing that we in the US have had as high of a fertility rate as we've had for so long, only recently pushing into the below replacement realm, considering our horrendous policies towards parental leave. It still blows my British wife's mind that she'd be expected to come back to work 3 months after having our first child (if she wants a paycheck) - it almost feels like child abuse to her.
Part of the reason that Japan "looks good by comparison" is that Japan has been trying to improve fertility for 20 years, mostly by the Nordic approach. The concept of Japan as an exemplar of low fertility is now out of date; although Japan is well below replacement, it's now got the highest TFR of any developed country in Asia and is only on the low end of the EU range.
I'll point out that even the TFRs of Italy and Spain aren't "catastrophic" in an economic sense unless they continue for centuries. Per capita economic growth will chug along just fine until the population becomes too small to support large metropolises and that will take quite a while.
Curt, perhaps “catastrophic” is too strong a word but the aging of humanity is a real and compounding problem. When you have a small population of young people trying to support a much larger elderly population their labor becomes increasingly priced-upwards. If there are three job vacancies and only one qualified candidate then you have to triage which jobs to vacate. The candidate will likely go to the job with the best incentives.
The cost of labor for a diminishing workforce only increases. This means the purchasing power for those on pensions only decreases. Young people faced with having to support their own immediate elderly family, plus the wider pension system are likely to have less bandwidth to raise large families of their own. You end up with smaller and smaller generations with increasingly over-taxed youth.
So I believed that the issue was families not having enough kids for the longest time - then I looked into the stats, and I think the issue isn't that, but rather that families are just not being formed at all.
Consider that in Italy, 40% of women between 15 and 64 are not married at all, 65% of women between 25 and 34 are not. And 34 is pretty late, and the stats don't look great for women older than 34 either.
It doesn't matter how much encouragement you provide for married couples to have kids if a vast majority of people in their prime years are not married, and is suspected, never will. The issue is not families not being supported enough, but rather the growing alienation and loneliness of society leading to a precipitous decline in dating and marriage.
I was always confused by Peter Zeihan's persistent comments on the coming doom for Europe and China as their demographic is aging. richer countries can go long way to subsidize healthcare, eldercare, and childcare reducing dependency on working age population.
but two problems: I think it will be a big problem for countries that have low GDP and were not able to gain from demographic dividend. also, why haven't european countries and japan increased incentives to have kids? It is expensive but they can foot the bill (I want a 500 million Japan).
also I dont know the state of pro-natal propaganda in these countries since I live in India and people here are still afraid of overpopulation but I would guess it could be increased.
also, I think US could still attract many talented young people from other countries for education, even 50 years in the future (if AI doesn't replace us all). Indian state of kerela has had a below replacement fertility rate for decades and still a large population migrates out. why do you think would immigration fall?
I'm Canadian, and our socialized healthcare model is already falling apart even before all the boomers flip from high income-tax payers to sickly retirees. Canada is rapidly running out of the ability to just throw $$$ at problems until they go away.
Especially if the economy gets shut down for carbon-neutral/ESG reasons.
I think Zeihan does tend to exaggerate the severity of problems, but.....not by all that much. Left-wing and right-wing media are both openly talking about the ongoing collapse of the Canadian healthcare system.
The obvious question to ask is whether the problem is with Canada's ability to provide healthcare or with Canada's ability to pay for healthcare. Are there too few doctors and health care workers in the pipeline? Are healthcare workers leaving the field for more lucrative or less demanding jobs? Are too many facilities ill equipped or approaching end of life? Alternatively, is the problem with balancing a set of arbitrary numbers? I'm willing to guess that there is a bit of each, but, usually, when one looks at this kind of problem, it is usually a matter of financial rules put in place to keep certain parties in their dominant positions in society rather than an actual matter of resources.
So, Canadian healthcare is a bit unique in that it's the exact opposite of the US system: private healthcare is more or less banned in Canada. We don't have a public option so much as a public monopoly. Most developed countries, like the UK, Germany, and Australia, have more of a hybrid system.
Healthcare workers can often make more by moving to the US and working in for-profit clinics, and they know that. There's a certain amount of brain-drain that goes on, that in theory could be solved by just throwing more money at higher compensation. Rigid licensing requirements that often don't recognize overseas training limits our ability to bring in workers from other countries. I guess the theory is just because someone is good enough to pass nursing school in Indonesia or wherever doesn't mean they're good enough to work as a nurse in Canada. It results in a smaller talent pipeline, but a uniformly highly skilled one.
The facilities themselves are pretty good; we just don't have enough of them, or enough workers to easily expand the system. Again, in theory that problem could be solved by throwing more money at it.
The rules in Canada aren't so much designed to "keep certain parties in their dominant positions in society". It's more that Canadians are terrified allowing any private/for-profit component is a slippery slope to American-style healthcare, so politicians refuse to reform the system even as it's unravelling.
Canada badly needs to hybridize some capitalism into the health-care system, as the socialized system can't keep up on its own. For-profit healthcare for those with tons of cash and/or great insurance, and a public option so nobody gets left behind, seems to be the way to go.
I can understand why Canadians are afraid of their health care system devolving into something like that in the US. I'm guessing that advocates of introducing the private sector are looking at the German, Australian or French model. Those, among others, are proof that the hybrid approach can work. Still, I'm skeptical.
You say that the personnel problem could be solved by throwing money at the system in the form of higher salaries, but feel that involving the private sector could work better. That can be risky. If you look at old age healthcare in the US, it is a hybrid system. There's a pay for services option where the government pays the medical bills directly and a pay for coverage option where the government pays a private insurer to pay the bills. The latter costs the government more than the former and, as people have been discovering, provides inferior coverage.
Down south, it seems that the more one sprinkles private sector dust on something, the more expensive and less effective it is. (It's not just health care. Look at our insane infrastructure costs. A lot of it is because we didn't spend the money to keep a good civil service engineering corps. Instead, we have legions of consultants.) Canadians are right to be scared of this. You could wind up throwing money at the problem anyway if you invite in the vipers of the private sector. Would that money be better tossed at higher pay for staff or at medical "managers"?
It's more that Canada needs private care as a release valve, because right now our problem isn't lack of coverage or even high costs; the problem is long wait times. People are dying in ER waiting rooms because there aren't any beds. If your appendix bursts, you might get added to a 12-month wait list for surgery. Those can be a rough 12 months.
The private sector, if we allowed them to, could absorb that overflow. It would largely be a parallel system for the rich, who can pay to skip the line in the public system, but doing that also makes the lines in the public system shorter overall, so really everyone wins.
The US has, by far, the best health care system in the world for rich people. Catering to the rich is one thing the vipers of the private sector can do quite well. In Canada, rich people who need health care regularly fly to Mexico and pay their way to the front of the line, rather than putting up with Canadian wait list times. If we allowed those for-profit clinics to set up shop in Canada, then they could siphon off the rich patients and drive down wait-list times in the public system.
Allowing the rich to spend their own money (or use their insurance) on health care is far better for public finances than forcing everything to go through the government. Canadians are just worried that the public system will get left behind, and as the for-profit clinics hoard all the top talent and equipment, we'll end up with a dysfunctional and neglected public option, but honestly the public system is already pretty dysfunctional.
Canada's (and most of the OECD) per capita cost of healthcare (public and private money) is about 60% of the US per capita cost. It is all about how a country wants to allocate its resources. The US has decided to subsidize big pharma, for-profit hospital chains, and wealthy specialist physicians while not providing universal healthcare. Canada went in the opposite direction, so the US can suck staff from Canada by paying them incrementally more.
The per capita difference in total healthcare expenses between Canada and the US would pay for the entire US military twice over.
The reason that Americans haven't revolted over healthcare is because it is largely subsidized for them by their employers. At some point in time, the employers are going to revolt over the massive health insurance premiums for their staff.
Canada provides other societal safety net measures not available in the US, such as more generous unemployment benefits, family leave, and other policies. It is effectively the definition of economics, of figuring out how to allocate limited resources with nearly unlimited demand.
Marrying money is one of the hardest jobs out there. Really. I've known people who have married for money, mainly in my parent's generation. Most of the marriages were successful on their own terms and some were successful on any terms. Still, marrying for money is not all that different from working for money. You are expected to perform. There are physical requirements for both men and women. It's a 24/7 job. There are exhausting emotional requirements and an obvious power imbalance. Divorce is an option, but money can buy really good divorce lawyers.
It's a fun fantasy, but it's best done with one's eyes open.
What is the actual point of these projections to 2100? No way that birth rates remain static in all these countries till then. Whether we actively change policies or not.
Over next 20-30 years immigration can change the picture, over 30-50 years policies that impact birth rate can make a difference. 50+ years is far to dependent on changes between now and then for any real prediction or need to take it into account in policy planning.
It feels like panic at low birth rates is the Malthusian fallacy of ours, the reverse Malthus I guess.
Immigration has to come from somewhere, and those "somewheres" have the same rapidly aging populations as developed countries do, except they're about 15 years behind the curve. So immigration can't change the picture for that much longer.
As for pro-birth policies, to some extent the damage is already done. Low birth rates 10 years ago means fewer adolescents today which means fewer young adults in 10 years, and having fewer young adults would mean there are fewer potential babymakers for any pro-birth policies to even affect.
At a certain tipping point, pro-birth policies become an act of closing the barn door when the horse is already gone.
The projections don't assume the birth rates will be static; the projections also include anticipated changes in fertility rates. You're right that such projections are pretty speculative.
Grandpa (or Grandma) did start a Substack. It's called Rockin' The Third Act (rockinretirement.substack.com). In it, we talk about how and why the older generation needs to continue to be productive in our "retirement" years, not just for the economy, but for our health and longevity. I think young people and older folks need to collaborate here. Young people have it figured out. They want to live productive lives on their terms - and they are! But it means they may want to do traditional work for fewer hours and get less burned out and find ways to do less traditional work. That will allow them to work for more years before they're just done with the whole rat race and it will stretch out that productivity curve. We, the older generation, can learn from that and retire to gigs and use our wisdom part time to teach what we've learned as they use their wisdom to move us forward. That will help make the peak of the productivity curve less flat. I talk about this in this edition: https://rockinretirement.substack.com/p/maybe-were-all-in-this-together
What do you think of the idea that, in an aging population, the growing burden of working age people looking after the elderly is balanced out by less child care duties? Kids can be pretty high maintenance too, so maybe it's kind of a dead heat?
Teacher salaries are a lot lower than doctor salaries though, and chalkboards cost a lot less than MRIs. A few years of chronic illness is easily more expensive than K-12.
The dependency ratio (share of population aged 15-64) is a nonsense. Young people are still mostly dependent into their early 20s nowadays, consuming expensive educational resources as well as parental support. As far as fiscal policy is concerned, old people are more noticeable because they are more likely to be supported by the state.
But the reality is that both the age of entering the workforce and the age of leaving it are rising about as fast as life expectancy.
We need to think outside the box; old recipes are not suitable for new problems. Politicians need to devise new strategist, however bold they may seem. I think we need to start collaborating more and competing less if we are to survive an anforeseen array of issues of fenomenal dimension. The common denominator is the climate change wich is altering so many factors that no one is now capable of guessing the consequences.
I think a lot of the changes lie within us folks and will evolve to particular conditions, rather than a policy hammer.
One thing Americans could do is start embracing is multigenerational living. Immigrant communities in America do this out of economic necessity, but it's beneficial in psychological ways as well.
For one thing, it would solve the child care and elder care problems. A grandparent would pick up the child from school, help with homework, play with them, etc. As a child gets older, they would run errands. It's a form of household mutual aid.
It's also a building slow wealth generationally. The more people living in a house, the more easy it is to justify a mortgage payment. Eventually, the house can pass down generationally or be sold. It also saves on payments to caregivers or domestics, allowing the money to stay within the household.
My maternal grandmother lived with us until I was 18. She was a tremendous support to my parents raising three children, though not so sure it was as great for her. She probably would have preferred living independently with her own network of friends.
It was not always easy for my parents. Mother torn between obligations to her mother vs husband; father sort of having to grin and bear it.
When I was younger, Real Estate ownership made sense. The rate of appreciation was slightly more than the rate of inflation and a large percentage of the cost could be financed by debt that was somewhat less than the rate of appreciation. The past 15 years have been a less stable version of the same story.
Appreciation was closely related to population, construction, and obsolescence, with the latter being more a function of where people wanted to live than the actual function of a building that could be refurbished.
This story changes dramatically in a country where population decreases. Obsolescence becomes common: Turning ownership in less desired locations into a game of musical chairs. Real prices are likely decline or become flat: eliminating a key component of middle-class wealth accumulation. This, in turn should impact the burden placed on those who are still working.
Honestly those real estate appreciation rates froze younger generations out of home ownership, and people living in cramped apartments tend to have fewer kids.
A real estate price crash would solve a fair number of problems actually.
It is far from certain that there would be a crash. The Real Values will gradually move towards nominal values as the population growth rate slows. Reductions in construction will dampen the population effect.
The only disadvantages of being frozen out of home ownership is the lack of rental expense certainty and reduced wealth creation. In this scenario, no one is able to create wealth. Though eliminating the fear of rent increases is absolutely a positive, I am not so certain how much better it is than certainty that you can move more easily, have some else be responsible for major repairs, and avoid the risk of increased property taxes. Take the wealth effect out of the equation, and most people will prefer to rent.
In time, perhaps cramped apartments will be eliminated. But they are still part of the housing stock, and a change in how valuable they are will only marginally affect how many remain in use.
I didn't say a crash will happen, just that it would solve a lot of problems if it did happen, one of which is low birth rates from young adults living in cramped apartments and as a result not wanting many kids.
World population is going to stabilize at the number of births equaling the number of deaths. We can all agree on that point. Population cannot increase indefinitely. If that is the case, why is there consistent doom and gloom from economists that society will fall apart, or things won't be quite as nice once that happens? And it will happen.
It seems to me that the problem is that the economics discipline won't know what to do when they can no longer conduct the statistical analysis and curve-fitting that the discipline is built upon. Economies that aren't growing will not fit the econometric models developed over decades. One can see why this might be troubling to those who no longer have courses to teach, textbooks to write, or PhD students to mentor.
We shouldn't be troubled by societies entering a slow-growth or stable population. It will provide opportunities to reclaim degraded and polluted lands and waters. It will provide opportunities to repair and upgrade existing infrastructure rather than expend resources for expansion of roads, gas and water lines, and electrical lines.
Let's not fret over this. It just is going to be different than what we have grown accustomed to.
Exponential growth is unstable. And yet not increasing population is a drag on the economy. And now I understand Truman's quote asking for a "one-handed economist".
> World population is going to stabilize at the number of births equaling the number of deaths. We can all agree on that point. Population cannot increase indefinitely.
It is true that, given a certain level of technology, Earth can only support a limited population, but even now we aren't close to that limit, & technology is still improving. The reason much of the world now has below-replacement fertility is that people are less willing to have children (given the social & economic situation), not that they are being forced to have fewer children (China's one child policy was a significant exception); if that trend reverses in the future, it will be because more people then will be willing to have more children, & if that willingness is based to a significant extent on genetic factors (as it may be, since most personality traits are partly heritable), then simple natural selection suggest that people willing to have more children should constitute an ever-larger proportion of the population — at least, until society changes enough that whatever personality traits are involved stop promoting higher fertility, which may happen quickly enough for the effect of natural selection to be relatively small.
That is the carrying capacity of ecology that says that populations will fluctuate around a given level of resources. I see no reason why the human species should be any different from other living organisms whose populations oscillate.
Then - how to maximize the level of resources and contol the depth of the oscillations?
The difference is humans have the ability to create technology to find and create more resources. Rabbits population will be limited to plants available to eat. As Norman Bourlog showed with the Green Revolution, humans can massively increase their food, water and energy to support ever growing populations. As population increases, usable resources have and will continue to grow.
Populations are about to flip from growth into declining though, because urbanization depressed birth rates (nobody living in a cramped apartment wants to have 6 kids), and because of old age (the past 50 years saw huge gains in global life spans, but that just deferred a lot of old age deaths which are about to start catching up)
Very good essay -- I've been writing about the same topic of late. One glitch: your link to Maestas, Mullen, & Powell goes to a different publication instead.
"If countries are smart, they’ll replenish their young populations with immigration."
There's the libertarian economist again. According to the uber-educated Left, borders are racist. According to the uber-educated Right, borders are pointless. According to the vast majority of Americans, borders are part of the definition of a nation.
I spent 20 years recovering from the single-minded, market/incentive focus an econ education gave me. (Philosophy and theology helped a lot.) It isn't that econ tools are bad; they're just more specialized than we tend to treat them. As I tell my HS students, when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail. But if it's really a screw, banging on it isn't going to change anything. And if it's really a lion, banging on it is likely to make things much worse. Too many economists see everything as nails.
I guess in theory, if you select for young people with strong job market skills (who will thus earn high salaries and pay lots of tax over a period of several decades), and if you keep bringing in those types of immigrants indefinitely, the stopgap could hold up for quite a long while.
But if immigration stops or if it shifts away from 24-year old engineers towards older and/or low-skilled workers, then the stopgap fails.
I am a robust 69 year old on the cutting edge of my profession. I believe that the assumptions underlying ageism are some of the last of the -isms to be exposed and countered.
1. All of my friends, in their 70s and in fields ranging from cardiology to forest management, have cut back their work schedules but are sought after, and paid, for insights and skills gleaned from their years of experience. Income -wise, they produce more than they consume. They serve on boards, local and national, non-profit and for-profit. They volunteer for roles that hold their communities together, as our well-educated mothers once did before they were allowed to enter the world outside of domesticity.
Where is the value-added part of being an elder getting factored into your opinions? Are older people really just so much dead weight?
2. You mention only briefly the lessened demand on our natural resources from smaller populations. Given the existential crisis the planet is facing, why is an ever-growing population considered a positive and inevitable outcome?
3. I have always wondered if our current system of income-earning workers supporting non-working elders is an enormous Ponzi scheme. At some point, the music stops . Is it not possible that as our population declines there will be a temporary unbalance that at some point will reach a new equilibrium between workers and retirees? Increasing the retirement age makes sense.
"All of my friends, in their 70s and in fields ranging from cardiology to forest management, have cut back their work schedules but are sought after, and paid, for insights and skills gleaned from their years of experience. Income -wise, they produce more than they consume. They serve on boards, local and national, non-profit and for-profit. They volunteer for roles that hold their communities together, as our well-educated mothers once did before they were allowed to enter the world outside of domesticity.
Where is the value-added part of being an elder getting factored into your opinions? Are older people really just so much dead weight?”
Great point. It should be factored in. It isn’t, because economists can’t/won’t try to measure it and therefor ignore it. GDP is all, but it doesn’t really represent “all”. It is another unmeasured - but positive - “externality”.
Existential crisis for the planet? Asteroid strike? Super nova? Gamma ray burst? Those are the only disasters that can eliminate much of life on the planet and even then the globe will still be there.
I think it all comes down to point #3 - when the music stops, that "temporary imbalance" will get really, really ugly for a few decades. Like calling the Black Death a "temporary imbalance" in the medieval European biome.
Aging isn't a bug, it's a feature. When you get to 65, you'll notice that there's a whole bunch of stuff you didn't have time for when working for a living: now you get to do those things.
Society (and idiot commentators*) need to stop whimpering and start figuring out how to return the favor to it's retired workers who dedicated 40 years of their lives to making society work.
(I suppose you can tell that (as a 70-year old retiree) I'm really pissed at the Japanese government for it's Covid policies, which are slaughtering over 400 elderly every day. My parents made it well into their 80s, and I was hoping to do somewhat better; busting my butt on nerding out in my 70s (doing a second undergrad degree (in Japanese lit.)) and playing in the fast lane of Japanese literary commentary in my 80s. Maybe not a plan any more.)
I'll be honest, Millennials got shafted so hard by Boomers in so many ways that none of us are thrilled by the prospect of having to subsidize your golden years. If we can find a way to shaft your generation back (e.g. raising the age of government pensions from 65 to 75), we'll probably take it.
Maybe Boomers should throw us a bone by all selling off their real estate to millennials for pennies on the dollar?
This Baby Boomer got 'shafted' by the cohort born directly after WWII. There were unimaginable resources availiable, in housing, education, jobs, advancement. By the time my age came along, housing only in the grubbiest areas, scramble for jobs, functional, ossified skill silos. BUT higher education was still available in a way that did not condemme to loan slavery.
I see what your age struggles with - no housing, exorbitant education, zero employer loyalty.
I've thought of selling my house (not able to be a home owner until my 50s) to a young couple at way reduced prices, when I have to move. But, how do I pay for wherever I move next? If I'm lucky, I can die here and leave the sale to someone other than private equity or second homers or short term rentals. I would like that.
There was a big difference between the lives of early baby boomers and late baby boomers. The National Lampoon used to joke about it. We were born in 1951, so we're the head of US Steel. You were born in 1964, so you're stuck as a clerk in a convenience store. Absolutely hilarious. [That was sarcasm.]
1. Assuming global population must be reduced to reduce environmental impact, I also assumed solving the dependency ratio problem would be key to building consensus for reducing populations. Perhaps not, as coming generations may gladly trade a consumerist lifestyle for something simpler?
2. The scuttlebutt from my relatives in mainland China is, the deaths resulting from the move from zero-Covid were welcomed by the government as a crude way to reduce an aging population. A horrible thought, but who knows?
Why assume population must be reduced to protect the environment? As world population has grown and gotten richer, the environment has improved in many measures.
That program was misinformation featuring the godfather of all mistaken environmental ideas Paul Ehrlich. Some species will go extinct but that’s natural selection and can’t be halted completely. As population grows and becomes richer it also becomes more urban and develops new technologies which will reduce humans impact on the natural environment.
One additional thing that aging could affect is domestic demand. Middle-age people with kids spend a lot of money. Elderly people don’t (possibly even adjusting for the goods/services difference you mention). So an aged country needs foreign markets to absorb production more than a young country does. That could make China more economically dependent on the rest of the world than vice versa, a real political effect!
Elderly people may or may not spend their own money on care -- varies by country -- but they sure consume plenty of it, and it does have to be paid for. (Until we bring slavery back. Just kidding.)
One avenue not explored here is some of the work by people like David Sinclair on epigenetics and mitigating the aging process. What are the implications of making 90 the new 60? If the body at 90 is rejuvenated, would people think and act like 60? Are Sinclair and his cohort all snake oil salesman? Should we be investing in more medical research and clinical trials?
Getting people to have more kids in a modern industrial/service economy means persuading them to have kids.
There seem to be two relatively effective approaches to this: one is patriarchy, ie pushing women out of the workforce to have and raise children, structuring the economy so that a single income is sufficient to support a household, making dual-income households rare, keeping (male) unemployment low, etc. This worked well in the US in the 1950s, leading to the Baby Boom. There were similar booms during les trente glorieuses and the Wirtschaftswunder (ie the 1950s and 1960s) in France and Germany.
I don't think this approach is socially acceptable now; any politician who proposed it would be driven out of office. It's worth noting that right-wing religious political parties have lots of senior women in them now - the Dutch SGP abandoned its long-standing opposition to women's suffrage in 2017, and started running women as candidates for political office the following year. Less explicitly religious parties of the right, like the French RN or the German AfD have plenty of senior women (the RN, of course, is led by Marine Le Pen). Similarly, leading figures of the right-wing within the US Republican Party (there isn't a formal leadership of the faction) are often women, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert - or Sarah Palin a generation ago.
The alternative approach is to ensure that working women are able to raise children, what we might call the "Nordic" approach. TFR in the Nordic countries is not above replacement, but it is notably higher than in most of the rest of Europe. Paid leave for parents (critically, both parents: if fathers don't take parental leave, then you create a huge incentive for employers to discriminate, which then incentivises women not to have children in order to avoid the discrimination) and high-quality childcare at affordable prices both go towards building a culture that is accepting of working women having children - which is essential if TFR is going to get back up towards replacement. France is another country with a robust TFR.
What does seem to be disastrous is for women to work but work not to be reshaped so that it is compatible with parenthood. The catastrophic TFRs of countries like Italy and Spain (so bad that even Japan looks good by comparison) seem to come from this place.
I think the explanation is actually simple in this case and can be summated into one word-“Time.”
Raising children takes time. To do it well requires tremendous sacrifice in personal time and leisure. I think many people in our present era see an opportunity cost--they can spend the ‘best years of their lives’ (i. e. 20s and 30s) indulging themselves, cultivating their careers or traveling the world OR they can start a family and have children. I think many choose the former option and only start to consider family life after they have “settled” or become “established in their careers” in their mid-30s.
At which point they are looking at a geriatric pregnancy and unlikely to have more than one, maybe two children.
Ironically, as we increase in wealth and can objectively afford to have more children, we choose not to because we would rather have our time back. I think the sacrifice in “time” to have a child is the causal factor. As we get wealthier we have more “diversions” which children pull us away from. Hence, society has less children.
We need to teach society that having children is worth your time. I have yet to meet someone who wishes they personally had less children.
I agree with everything you say, up until your last sentence. Consider that the reason you've never met anyone who wishes they had fewer children is that there's a very strong taboo against people, especially mothers, saying such a thing. A woman who says "I wish my child didn't exist" would be seen as a heartless monster. I know there are online forums where parents post their regrets anonymously, and anecdotal evidence suggests that there are people who think "I love my child, but if I could do it over again, I would not have had him/her. The cost (in time, effort, energy, sleepless nights, loss of my sense of self) is too much." And I can only imagine what some parents of children with lifelong disabilities are saying.
Love is a powerful force, but I've known people with regrets. As you note, they don't wear "take my child, please" tee shirts, but they will often admit that they wish things had been different.
I can, of course, only speak from my limited experience. But you do have to ask yourself the question: “in your old age and dotage, would you rather trust an institution/old peoples home to care for you or a child whom you raised and maintained a lifelong loving relationship with?”
I think a lot of people are pondering this question. As there are less workers--will the smaller working age generation content itself to work in retirement homes or will they seek employment in other careers? There already is a shortage of caregivers. If there are none left to care for the elderly then what can they do?
At least if you have a child of your own you can bank on someone watching over you in your old age. Has this not been the way of humanity for thousands of years? The more children you have, the more able they will be to support you as they can pool their resources and pair their efforts. I am not so sure a welfare state is equipped to handle a situation where the geriatric nearly outnumber those still in the workforce.
A lot depends on the family. Do the children have the necessary resources for that kind of care? How well does the parent get along with the children? The oldest child rarely gets along well with the same sex parent. Is there even a relationship between the parents and children? A huge number of children had wretched childhoods. One has to be a starry eyed optimist to expect one's children to care for one in one's old age. Judging from the typical family dynamics, having more children rarely helps.
There is a popular fantasy of being taken care of by one's children in one's old age, but I'd say the odds are one in five for those who had children, and it would usually involve putting a major burden on the children, usually the daughters or daughters in law. That's right. A lot of people have more than one parent, so a couple would have four. Most of the people I know are loath to place that burden on their progeny. Why screw them over after all that hard work helping them get on track? They'd rather deal with institutions.
There's also a societal cost. If you think it is hard getting care givers now, consider what happens if children were required to take care of their failing parents. To start with, it would knock a lot of women especially out of the work force, but men also have parents and not all of them are married. It would lower productivity overall since taking long term indefinite leave to take care of a parent would kill one's career. Depending on the level of care, it's hard to imagine the care taking children even holding down jobs.
Since I'm typing this on a computer, I am not all that receptive to arguments based on thousands of years of practice. You seem to be arguing for a traditional gerontocracy in which a small number of old people command the resources of large numbers of young people. That kind of society does care for the old, but it is stagnant, repressive and hard to idealize let alone consider a model for our future.
P.S. Are you familiar with the parable of the wooden trough? Those traditional societies had their discontents.
Kaleberg,
You are imputing to me an argument I did not make. I have not argued for a gerontocracy. In fact, I would argue that people should have children, lots of them and raise them in such a loving way that the children would not countenance their elderly parents being destitute.
My point is that as the size of the workforce diminishes you encounter labor induced inflation. If societies have to triage between essential services such as Fire and EMS or elderly and hospice care you are presenting the upcoming generation with very bad options. If you have one worker but need to fill a position in your fire department, your police department, retirement home or your farm you have to get very creative. The increasingly diminished workforce can charge a premium on labor.
Cost of labor will skyrocket and this is very bad for people living on fixed incomes--such as pensioners. What happens when you cannot afford elderly care and you have no living relatives? You have to trust the state to provision your care--again, those care workers will charge a premium. Programs will be insolvent and you will have to tax those in the workforce at very high rates.
None of this is a recipe for social stability. It is not a ‘catastrophe’ but it is a crisis, one best resolved by trying to foster, at a minimum, a replacement birth rate.
How do you intend to enforce "lovingly"? That's an extremely serious question. Historically, societies with large numbers of children have been repressive. To be honest, I cannot think of one that has not been. They usually completely sacrifice women and provide few protections for children. Large families have their own dynamics, and are fundamentally asymmetrical. I'm sure there have been plenty of loving families, even large ones, but it is hard to see how to enforce this as we must if this is to be a societal solution.
I appreciate your answer. If anything, it is it Dickensian. Dickens was a social reformer, and many of his books were what we would now call social problem books. What should we do about orphans? Is our criminal justice system too harsh? How important is the work / life balance? Dickens' solution almost always involves "lovingly". We need kinder, gentler workplaces, prisons, orphanages, poor farms and whatever, all appropriately perfused with love and care. Sometimes lots of children are involved. It makes for a happy ending, but it doesn't address the actual problem. Still, Dickens made a lot of people care, which is more than a lot of social reformers, but it was social reformers who did the heavy lifting.
"I'm sure there have been plenty of loving families, even large ones," - I would suggest you have a bias you need to check. - someone with 8 siblings who all love each other and their parents.
I never said that there are no loving families, just that not every family is a loving family. If you are going to make policy assuming that all families are loving, you are going to make pretty awful policy.
Maybe if the opportunity cost of taking the time to raise children was lower, more people would have them. Right now, it is an immense cost, especially as our society has bifurcated into a small group of winners and a vast majority of losers.
I once read somebody who said out on a farm, kids are an asset, because they can help with all the chores that go into keeping a farm running. But in a city, kids are a burden, so urbanization is really what makes birth rates drop.
I guess if we all move back out into the country, the opportunity cost of kids flips around and they basically become free labour.
That's a big part of it, but France had a big drop in fertility in the mid-18th century without major urbanization. It was a big enough drop that the GDP per population ratio in France was higher than that of England into the mid-19th century. France stayed relatively agricultural into the 20th century. Urbanization is a lot of it, but when Casanova starts using condoms, as he did by 1760, there are clearly other drivers.
That's actually not true until child labor was banned and compulsory education introduced
Not having kids is for society what not eating food is for the individual. The effects of the former are just further out, but they are the same nonetheless; the death of the (social) organism. If the "common good" means anything, people have a social and moral duty to "make time" for children. Of course there are exceptions that prove the rule (the infertile etc.) If enough people won't then the society they constitute is suicidal.
I think suicidal gets the direction right, but overstates the problem. The alternative is to have a population that keeps growing and growing. If you do the math on that, you get a population in the quadrillions and there are bigger numbers than that. The alternatives are a perfectly static population which is probably unattainable in practice or accepting that the population will decrease at times. Some people argue that this should be done by unleashing the Four Horsemen and letting the corpses fall where they may. Others, like me, would prefer people simply choosing to have fewer children.
There is a countervailing force. Societies with smaller populations will have more resources for people, and that will encourage people to have children. That's what happened in the US after the Great Depression and World War II. There was a depressed birth cohort, casualties during the war and then a massive economic boom combined with pro-family policies that led to the baby boom from 1946 to 1964.
Societies that want growing populations should provide people with the necessary resources. Right now, most of them make raising children a major challenge. People have a lot of social and moral duties to society, but relying on people's better angels doesn't work. Some people argue for a punitive approach like the Roman bachelor tax or the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion. Others, like me, argue for a more positive approach based on incentives and lowering barriers.
P.S. My weight has gone up and down over the years. Sometimes I eat too much and need to cut back for a while. At other times, I just let loose and pack on the pounds. Cutting back after a period of feasting is not suicidal.
Thanks for the comments. First, I agree with pro-family policies, we need to, on a public policy level, incentivize families forming, staying together, and having and rearing children.
Three things, 1) while I do think there is a subjective element to human happiness, such as someone finding a measure of happiness in this or that hobby lifestyle or career, there are objective components. As persons who by nature can know and love, we are made for communion with other persons. Having a family that one loves and lives with is that interpersonal communion at its most essential level. Man was not made to be alone. It is also quite fantastic that what is for the common good is also what is for my or your good.
2) Pragmatically, on a secular level, I do think the answer to many of our problems is more and better raised humans. Now, I'm not saying everyone needs to have 10+ children. But people should, on average, at a minimum replace themselves. But there is room for much more. Almost an unlimited amount more. The universe is quite big. Human ingenuity and capacity for excellence can largely overcome things like food shortages. More of that will do better than less of it.
3) I don't think our birth rate is as flexible as it once was, we are dealing with anti-natalist and identity ideologies. Children are no longer seen as a gift and a blessing, full-stop, but are more seen as optional accessories and one that is increasingly frowned upon as bad for oneself, society, and the environment. Our self-identity is more inward-focused than it used to be. Modern man is first a psychological man and not someone who bases his main sense of identity in how he relates to others. A person's primary identity seems to whether he is black, gay, trans, etc., and no longer in whether he is a father, husband, member of a clan or country etc,. Identity has become inward focused and not outward focused. This will not help families form when we need it. After all, we have been not replacing ourselves for a few decades and it is only getting worse. So the problem is not overstated.
Yes, traditional/patriarchal attitudes/culture combined with allowing women to get educated and work is the worst of both worlds. Germany is another place where the schools are structured in a way where someone in the family (usually the mother) is expected to pick up the kids and feed them lunch. Obviously not compatible with many jobs.
So the only viable options are full-on patriarchy (not allowing women to work) or the Scandinavian model, which not only is allowing work with motherhood more easily but also be culturally more accepting of children born out of wedlock.
Or the French, who aren't keen on unmarried parents, but have no problem with pacsé ones. Which is their distinctively-French civil union that they fell into by accident (it was originally going to be only for gay people and was amended to allow straight people at the last minute).
The problem with patriarchy is that it removes women from the workforce for decades if not completely. Eliminating such a huge number of workers doesn't help the worker-dependent ratio or the worker-retiree ratio. That's why I suspect there is a lot of bad faith in these arguments. A lot of conservatives look at the Taliban and like what they see. Arguing about the worker-retiree ratio gives them a hook to push for those policies here. It's like the budget deficit or inflation. Whether it matters or not depends on which solutions are being proposed and less on the balance between taxes and spending or rising costs for workers versus rising costs for businesses.
It's amazing that we in the US have had as high of a fertility rate as we've had for so long, only recently pushing into the below replacement realm, considering our horrendous policies towards parental leave. It still blows my British wife's mind that she'd be expected to come back to work 3 months after having our first child (if she wants a paycheck) - it almost feels like child abuse to her.
It is child abuse.
Still without such structure how do we see the US where it is today.
My dad is from New York
(just saying)
I had this conversation with Ivana (Laura's mom) because in Croatia yiu get a full year which is amazing, still
First 6 months full salary
The last six months slashes and you get 70% or so
Ivana called and asked for money
I had no problem with that call
But...
it shows us that once the woman gets less money....
Part of the reason that Japan "looks good by comparison" is that Japan has been trying to improve fertility for 20 years, mostly by the Nordic approach. The concept of Japan as an exemplar of low fertility is now out of date; although Japan is well below replacement, it's now got the highest TFR of any developed country in Asia and is only on the low end of the EU range.
I'll point out that even the TFRs of Italy and Spain aren't "catastrophic" in an economic sense unless they continue for centuries. Per capita economic growth will chug along just fine until the population becomes too small to support large metropolises and that will take quite a while.
Curt, perhaps “catastrophic” is too strong a word but the aging of humanity is a real and compounding problem. When you have a small population of young people trying to support a much larger elderly population their labor becomes increasingly priced-upwards. If there are three job vacancies and only one qualified candidate then you have to triage which jobs to vacate. The candidate will likely go to the job with the best incentives.
The cost of labor for a diminishing workforce only increases. This means the purchasing power for those on pensions only decreases. Young people faced with having to support their own immediate elderly family, plus the wider pension system are likely to have less bandwidth to raise large families of their own. You end up with smaller and smaller generations with increasingly over-taxed youth.
This is not a recipe for social stability.
Every time I start explaining this concept people laugh and snooze.
I wonder why people think the money in the Social Security comes from the infinity vault...
So I believed that the issue was families not having enough kids for the longest time - then I looked into the stats, and I think the issue isn't that, but rather that families are just not being formed at all.
Consider that in Italy, 40% of women between 15 and 64 are not married at all, 65% of women between 25 and 34 are not. And 34 is pretty late, and the stats don't look great for women older than 34 either.
https://www.istat.it/en/archivio/220721#:~:text=At%20January%201st%202018%2C%20in,39%25%20of%20the%20total).
It doesn't matter how much encouragement you provide for married couples to have kids if a vast majority of people in their prime years are not married, and is suspected, never will. The issue is not families not being supported enough, but rather the growing alienation and loneliness of society leading to a precipitous decline in dating and marriage.
I was always confused by Peter Zeihan's persistent comments on the coming doom for Europe and China as their demographic is aging. richer countries can go long way to subsidize healthcare, eldercare, and childcare reducing dependency on working age population.
but two problems: I think it will be a big problem for countries that have low GDP and were not able to gain from demographic dividend. also, why haven't european countries and japan increased incentives to have kids? It is expensive but they can foot the bill (I want a 500 million Japan).
also I dont know the state of pro-natal propaganda in these countries since I live in India and people here are still afraid of overpopulation but I would guess it could be increased.
also, I think US could still attract many talented young people from other countries for education, even 50 years in the future (if AI doesn't replace us all). Indian state of kerela has had a below replacement fertility rate for decades and still a large population migrates out. why do you think would immigration fall?
I'm Canadian, and our socialized healthcare model is already falling apart even before all the boomers flip from high income-tax payers to sickly retirees. Canada is rapidly running out of the ability to just throw $$$ at problems until they go away.
Especially if the economy gets shut down for carbon-neutral/ESG reasons.
I think Zeihan does tend to exaggerate the severity of problems, but.....not by all that much. Left-wing and right-wing media are both openly talking about the ongoing collapse of the Canadian healthcare system.
The obvious question to ask is whether the problem is with Canada's ability to provide healthcare or with Canada's ability to pay for healthcare. Are there too few doctors and health care workers in the pipeline? Are healthcare workers leaving the field for more lucrative or less demanding jobs? Are too many facilities ill equipped or approaching end of life? Alternatively, is the problem with balancing a set of arbitrary numbers? I'm willing to guess that there is a bit of each, but, usually, when one looks at this kind of problem, it is usually a matter of financial rules put in place to keep certain parties in their dominant positions in society rather than an actual matter of resources.
So, Canadian healthcare is a bit unique in that it's the exact opposite of the US system: private healthcare is more or less banned in Canada. We don't have a public option so much as a public monopoly. Most developed countries, like the UK, Germany, and Australia, have more of a hybrid system.
Healthcare workers can often make more by moving to the US and working in for-profit clinics, and they know that. There's a certain amount of brain-drain that goes on, that in theory could be solved by just throwing more money at higher compensation. Rigid licensing requirements that often don't recognize overseas training limits our ability to bring in workers from other countries. I guess the theory is just because someone is good enough to pass nursing school in Indonesia or wherever doesn't mean they're good enough to work as a nurse in Canada. It results in a smaller talent pipeline, but a uniformly highly skilled one.
The facilities themselves are pretty good; we just don't have enough of them, or enough workers to easily expand the system. Again, in theory that problem could be solved by throwing more money at it.
The rules in Canada aren't so much designed to "keep certain parties in their dominant positions in society". It's more that Canadians are terrified allowing any private/for-profit component is a slippery slope to American-style healthcare, so politicians refuse to reform the system even as it's unravelling.
Canada badly needs to hybridize some capitalism into the health-care system, as the socialized system can't keep up on its own. For-profit healthcare for those with tons of cash and/or great insurance, and a public option so nobody gets left behind, seems to be the way to go.
I can understand why Canadians are afraid of their health care system devolving into something like that in the US. I'm guessing that advocates of introducing the private sector are looking at the German, Australian or French model. Those, among others, are proof that the hybrid approach can work. Still, I'm skeptical.
You say that the personnel problem could be solved by throwing money at the system in the form of higher salaries, but feel that involving the private sector could work better. That can be risky. If you look at old age healthcare in the US, it is a hybrid system. There's a pay for services option where the government pays the medical bills directly and a pay for coverage option where the government pays a private insurer to pay the bills. The latter costs the government more than the former and, as people have been discovering, provides inferior coverage.
Down south, it seems that the more one sprinkles private sector dust on something, the more expensive and less effective it is. (It's not just health care. Look at our insane infrastructure costs. A lot of it is because we didn't spend the money to keep a good civil service engineering corps. Instead, we have legions of consultants.) Canadians are right to be scared of this. You could wind up throwing money at the problem anyway if you invite in the vipers of the private sector. Would that money be better tossed at higher pay for staff or at medical "managers"?
It's more that Canada needs private care as a release valve, because right now our problem isn't lack of coverage or even high costs; the problem is long wait times. People are dying in ER waiting rooms because there aren't any beds. If your appendix bursts, you might get added to a 12-month wait list for surgery. Those can be a rough 12 months.
The private sector, if we allowed them to, could absorb that overflow. It would largely be a parallel system for the rich, who can pay to skip the line in the public system, but doing that also makes the lines in the public system shorter overall, so really everyone wins.
The US has, by far, the best health care system in the world for rich people. Catering to the rich is one thing the vipers of the private sector can do quite well. In Canada, rich people who need health care regularly fly to Mexico and pay their way to the front of the line, rather than putting up with Canadian wait list times. If we allowed those for-profit clinics to set up shop in Canada, then they could siphon off the rich patients and drive down wait-list times in the public system.
Allowing the rich to spend their own money (or use their insurance) on health care is far better for public finances than forcing everything to go through the government. Canadians are just worried that the public system will get left behind, and as the for-profit clinics hoard all the top talent and equipment, we'll end up with a dysfunctional and neglected public option, but honestly the public system is already pretty dysfunctional.
Canada's (and most of the OECD) per capita cost of healthcare (public and private money) is about 60% of the US per capita cost. It is all about how a country wants to allocate its resources. The US has decided to subsidize big pharma, for-profit hospital chains, and wealthy specialist physicians while not providing universal healthcare. Canada went in the opposite direction, so the US can suck staff from Canada by paying them incrementally more.
The per capita difference in total healthcare expenses between Canada and the US would pay for the entire US military twice over.
The reason that Americans haven't revolted over healthcare is because it is largely subsidized for them by their employers. At some point in time, the employers are going to revolt over the massive health insurance premiums for their staff.
Canada provides other societal safety net measures not available in the US, such as more generous unemployment benefits, family leave, and other policies. It is effectively the definition of economics, of figuring out how to allocate limited resources with nearly unlimited demand.
no worries, the canadian healthcare system is not alone
latin america is collapsing too at a very nice speed.
Money does not solve problems, it never does
It does give the impression, but we know...
I think Denmark was one of the first countries to accept that giving money or using money does not work in the long-term problems.
Like giving money to people without working not exactly a winning formula.
Incentives does not cut it anymore.
I am from the school that women (even more educated than men today) do not want to do that for many reasons not only the $$$$$ one.
Or at the very least, don't start wanting it until they're 40, by which time it's biologically a pretty tall order to start having kids.
The alternative is trying to get a decent job and earn a decent living starting at age 40. That's a pretty tall order as well.
The other alternative is marry a rich dude I suppose.
Marrying money is one of the hardest jobs out there. Really. I've known people who have married for money, mainly in my parent's generation. Most of the marriages were successful on their own terms and some were successful on any terms. Still, marrying for money is not all that different from working for money. You are expected to perform. There are physical requirements for both men and women. It's a 24/7 job. There are exhausting emotional requirements and an obvious power imbalance. Divorce is an option, but money can buy really good divorce lawyers.
It's a fun fantasy, but it's best done with one's eyes open.
This reminds me a bit of a Bill Burr standup routine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xp4z5qlyqs&ab_channel=JustForLaughs
Or...
marry a rich girl too
Highly complex task
unless you do some tech work
programmers?
I agree and I see this being the same challenge for men with some differences.
I have Laura my daughter and she turned 1 year last week.
I am 39 about to turn 40 and God you need some energy to keep up with her.
No worries, Ai won't replace us all, not for the next 200 years.
And so I start praying for this to be a reality. :)
What is the actual point of these projections to 2100? No way that birth rates remain static in all these countries till then. Whether we actively change policies or not.
Over next 20-30 years immigration can change the picture, over 30-50 years policies that impact birth rate can make a difference. 50+ years is far to dependent on changes between now and then for any real prediction or need to take it into account in policy planning.
It feels like panic at low birth rates is the Malthusian fallacy of ours, the reverse Malthus I guess.
Immigration has to come from somewhere, and those "somewheres" have the same rapidly aging populations as developed countries do, except they're about 15 years behind the curve. So immigration can't change the picture for that much longer.
As for pro-birth policies, to some extent the damage is already done. Low birth rates 10 years ago means fewer adolescents today which means fewer young adults in 10 years, and having fewer young adults would mean there are fewer potential babymakers for any pro-birth policies to even affect.
At a certain tipping point, pro-birth policies become an act of closing the barn door when the horse is already gone.
I love every paragraph
The projections don't assume the birth rates will be static; the projections also include anticipated changes in fertility rates. You're right that such projections are pretty speculative.
Demographic aging and economic growth are difficult to reconcile though. More likely we're heading for a period of belt-tightening.
Time to tell grandpa to start a substack!
Grandpa (or Grandma) did start a Substack. It's called Rockin' The Third Act (rockinretirement.substack.com). In it, we talk about how and why the older generation needs to continue to be productive in our "retirement" years, not just for the economy, but for our health and longevity. I think young people and older folks need to collaborate here. Young people have it figured out. They want to live productive lives on their terms - and they are! But it means they may want to do traditional work for fewer hours and get less burned out and find ways to do less traditional work. That will allow them to work for more years before they're just done with the whole rat race and it will stretch out that productivity curve. We, the older generation, can learn from that and retire to gigs and use our wisdom part time to teach what we've learned as they use their wisdom to move us forward. That will help make the peak of the productivity curve less flat. I talk about this in this edition: https://rockinretirement.substack.com/p/maybe-were-all-in-this-together
What do you think of the idea that, in an aging population, the growing burden of working age people looking after the elderly is balanced out by less child care duties? Kids can be pretty high maintenance too, so maybe it's kind of a dead heat?
Or recruit the elderly to work in childcare more.
Elderly are way more expensive healthcare-wise; babies need far fewer hip replacements and aren't on nearly as many meds.
Children need much more extensive supervision and education. The total costs end up being pretty much a wash.
Teacher salaries are a lot lower than doctor salaries though, and chalkboards cost a lot less than MRIs. A few years of chronic illness is easily more expensive than K-12.
The dependency ratio (share of population aged 15-64) is a nonsense. Young people are still mostly dependent into their early 20s nowadays, consuming expensive educational resources as well as parental support. As far as fiscal policy is concerned, old people are more noticeable because they are more likely to be supported by the state.
But the reality is that both the age of entering the workforce and the age of leaving it are rising about as fast as life expectancy.
We need to think outside the box; old recipes are not suitable for new problems. Politicians need to devise new strategist, however bold they may seem. I think we need to start collaborating more and competing less if we are to survive an anforeseen array of issues of fenomenal dimension. The common denominator is the climate change wich is altering so many factors that no one is now capable of guessing the consequences.
Politicians are not the solution.
I like your "collaborating" view
I think a lot of the changes lie within us folks and will evolve to particular conditions, rather than a policy hammer.
One thing Americans could do is start embracing is multigenerational living. Immigrant communities in America do this out of economic necessity, but it's beneficial in psychological ways as well.
For one thing, it would solve the child care and elder care problems. A grandparent would pick up the child from school, help with homework, play with them, etc. As a child gets older, they would run errands. It's a form of household mutual aid.
It's also a building slow wealth generationally. The more people living in a house, the more easy it is to justify a mortgage payment. Eventually, the house can pass down generationally or be sold. It also saves on payments to caregivers or domestics, allowing the money to stay within the household.
à la Italiano
I think Malcolm Maxwell in The Outliers have a chapter where italians migrate to America and live in one single house like 3 generations.
Multigenerational living sounds great
but based on today's structure how do we make it work.
I am positive it will work for a few families
My maternal grandmother lived with us until I was 18. She was a tremendous support to my parents raising three children, though not so sure it was as great for her. She probably would have preferred living independently with her own network of friends.
It was not always easy for my parents. Mother torn between obligations to her mother vs husband; father sort of having to grin and bear it.
But for the children at least, a good thing.
When I was younger, Real Estate ownership made sense. The rate of appreciation was slightly more than the rate of inflation and a large percentage of the cost could be financed by debt that was somewhat less than the rate of appreciation. The past 15 years have been a less stable version of the same story.
Appreciation was closely related to population, construction, and obsolescence, with the latter being more a function of where people wanted to live than the actual function of a building that could be refurbished.
This story changes dramatically in a country where population decreases. Obsolescence becomes common: Turning ownership in less desired locations into a game of musical chairs. Real prices are likely decline or become flat: eliminating a key component of middle-class wealth accumulation. This, in turn should impact the burden placed on those who are still working.
Honestly those real estate appreciation rates froze younger generations out of home ownership, and people living in cramped apartments tend to have fewer kids.
A real estate price crash would solve a fair number of problems actually.
It is far from certain that there would be a crash. The Real Values will gradually move towards nominal values as the population growth rate slows. Reductions in construction will dampen the population effect.
The only disadvantages of being frozen out of home ownership is the lack of rental expense certainty and reduced wealth creation. In this scenario, no one is able to create wealth. Though eliminating the fear of rent increases is absolutely a positive, I am not so certain how much better it is than certainty that you can move more easily, have some else be responsible for major repairs, and avoid the risk of increased property taxes. Take the wealth effect out of the equation, and most people will prefer to rent.
In time, perhaps cramped apartments will be eliminated. But they are still part of the housing stock, and a change in how valuable they are will only marginally affect how many remain in use.
I didn't say a crash will happen, just that it would solve a lot of problems if it did happen, one of which is low birth rates from young adults living in cramped apartments and as a result not wanting many kids.
World population is going to stabilize at the number of births equaling the number of deaths. We can all agree on that point. Population cannot increase indefinitely. If that is the case, why is there consistent doom and gloom from economists that society will fall apart, or things won't be quite as nice once that happens? And it will happen.
It seems to me that the problem is that the economics discipline won't know what to do when they can no longer conduct the statistical analysis and curve-fitting that the discipline is built upon. Economies that aren't growing will not fit the econometric models developed over decades. One can see why this might be troubling to those who no longer have courses to teach, textbooks to write, or PhD students to mentor.
We shouldn't be troubled by societies entering a slow-growth or stable population. It will provide opportunities to reclaim degraded and polluted lands and waters. It will provide opportunities to repair and upgrade existing infrastructure rather than expend resources for expansion of roads, gas and water lines, and electrical lines.
Let's not fret over this. It just is going to be different than what we have grown accustomed to.
Everything with an exponential growth curve is inherently unstable...
Exponential growth is unstable. And yet not increasing population is a drag on the economy. And now I understand Truman's quote asking for a "one-handed economist".
What makes you say population growth is a drag on the economy? The world has been growing more populous and richer for the last 200 years.
Isn't he saying the opposite? That a LACK of population growth is a drag on the economy?
Noah writes:
"It's not a disaster, but it is a persistent drag."
Every curve that appears to be exponential is really logistical.
> World population is going to stabilize at the number of births equaling the number of deaths. We can all agree on that point. Population cannot increase indefinitely.
It is true that, given a certain level of technology, Earth can only support a limited population, but even now we aren't close to that limit, & technology is still improving. The reason much of the world now has below-replacement fertility is that people are less willing to have children (given the social & economic situation), not that they are being forced to have fewer children (China's one child policy was a significant exception); if that trend reverses in the future, it will be because more people then will be willing to have more children, & if that willingness is based to a significant extent on genetic factors (as it may be, since most personality traits are partly heritable), then simple natural selection suggest that people willing to have more children should constitute an ever-larger proportion of the population — at least, until society changes enough that whatever personality traits are involved stop promoting higher fertility, which may happen quickly enough for the effect of natural selection to be relatively small.
> World population is going to stabilize at the number of births equaling the number of deaths. We can all agree on that point.
I don't follow. Why would we all agree on that? I don't see any reason it couldn't oscillate above and below replacement rate for decades at a time.
That is the carrying capacity of ecology that says that populations will fluctuate around a given level of resources. I see no reason why the human species should be any different from other living organisms whose populations oscillate.
Then - how to maximize the level of resources and contol the depth of the oscillations?
The difference is humans have the ability to create technology to find and create more resources. Rabbits population will be limited to plants available to eat. As Norman Bourlog showed with the Green Revolution, humans can massively increase their food, water and energy to support ever growing populations. As population increases, usable resources have and will continue to grow.
Populations are about to flip from growth into declining though, because urbanization depressed birth rates (nobody living in a cramped apartment wants to have 6 kids), and because of old age (the past 50 years saw huge gains in global life spans, but that just deferred a lot of old age deaths which are about to start catching up)
Just can't see the rate of technological innovation being faster than the rate of resource depletion. But hope you're right.
That's right. There is nothing like a reduced population and an improved resource ratio to spur growth in population. This is historical fact.
Very good essay -- I've been writing about the same topic of late. One glitch: your link to Maestas, Mullen, & Powell goes to a different publication instead.
Thanks, fixed!!
"If countries are smart, they’ll replenish their young populations with immigration."
There's the libertarian economist again. According to the uber-educated Left, borders are racist. According to the uber-educated Right, borders are pointless. According to the vast majority of Americans, borders are part of the definition of a nation.
I spent 20 years recovering from the single-minded, market/incentive focus an econ education gave me. (Philosophy and theology helped a lot.) It isn't that econ tools are bad; they're just more specialized than we tend to treat them. As I tell my HS students, when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail. But if it's really a screw, banging on it isn't going to change anything. And if it's really a lion, banging on it is likely to make things much worse. Too many economists see everything as nails.
And he’s right, immigration is the answer and your revolt against thinking about economics is no answer at all.
Immigration produces old people. Really. Immigrants age just like everyone else. They're just a stop gap.
I guess in theory, if you select for young people with strong job market skills (who will thus earn high salaries and pay lots of tax over a period of several decades), and if you keep bringing in those types of immigrants indefinitely, the stopgap could hold up for quite a long while.
But if immigration stops or if it shifts away from 24-year old engineers towards older and/or low-skilled workers, then the stopgap fails.
I am a robust 69 year old on the cutting edge of my profession. I believe that the assumptions underlying ageism are some of the last of the -isms to be exposed and countered.
1. All of my friends, in their 70s and in fields ranging from cardiology to forest management, have cut back their work schedules but are sought after, and paid, for insights and skills gleaned from their years of experience. Income -wise, they produce more than they consume. They serve on boards, local and national, non-profit and for-profit. They volunteer for roles that hold their communities together, as our well-educated mothers once did before they were allowed to enter the world outside of domesticity.
Where is the value-added part of being an elder getting factored into your opinions? Are older people really just so much dead weight?
2. You mention only briefly the lessened demand on our natural resources from smaller populations. Given the existential crisis the planet is facing, why is an ever-growing population considered a positive and inevitable outcome?
3. I have always wondered if our current system of income-earning workers supporting non-working elders is an enormous Ponzi scheme. At some point, the music stops . Is it not possible that as our population declines there will be a temporary unbalance that at some point will reach a new equilibrium between workers and retirees? Increasing the retirement age makes sense.
"All of my friends, in their 70s and in fields ranging from cardiology to forest management, have cut back their work schedules but are sought after, and paid, for insights and skills gleaned from their years of experience. Income -wise, they produce more than they consume. They serve on boards, local and national, non-profit and for-profit. They volunteer for roles that hold their communities together, as our well-educated mothers once did before they were allowed to enter the world outside of domesticity.
Where is the value-added part of being an elder getting factored into your opinions? Are older people really just so much dead weight?”
Great point. It should be factored in. It isn’t, because economists can’t/won’t try to measure it and therefor ignore it. GDP is all, but it doesn’t really represent “all”. It is another unmeasured - but positive - “externality”.
Existential crisis for the planet? Asteroid strike? Super nova? Gamma ray burst? Those are the only disasters that can eliminate much of life on the planet and even then the globe will still be there.
I think it all comes down to point #3 - when the music stops, that "temporary imbalance" will get really, really ugly for a few decades. Like calling the Black Death a "temporary imbalance" in the medieval European biome.
That ugly? 40% population decline over one century?
No, not *that* ugly, just using it to prove a point that something can be temporary but still ugly.
Aging isn't a bug, it's a feature. When you get to 65, you'll notice that there's a whole bunch of stuff you didn't have time for when working for a living: now you get to do those things.
Society (and idiot commentators*) need to stop whimpering and start figuring out how to return the favor to it's retired workers who dedicated 40 years of their lives to making society work.
(I suppose you can tell that (as a 70-year old retiree) I'm really pissed at the Japanese government for it's Covid policies, which are slaughtering over 400 elderly every day. My parents made it well into their 80s, and I was hoping to do somewhat better; busting my butt on nerding out in my 70s (doing a second undergrad degree (in Japanese lit.)) and playing in the fast lane of Japanese literary commentary in my 80s. Maybe not a plan any more.)
*: especially one's with rabbits.
I'll be honest, Millennials got shafted so hard by Boomers in so many ways that none of us are thrilled by the prospect of having to subsidize your golden years. If we can find a way to shaft your generation back (e.g. raising the age of government pensions from 65 to 75), we'll probably take it.
Maybe Boomers should throw us a bone by all selling off their real estate to millennials for pennies on the dollar?
This Baby Boomer got 'shafted' by the cohort born directly after WWII. There were unimaginable resources availiable, in housing, education, jobs, advancement. By the time my age came along, housing only in the grubbiest areas, scramble for jobs, functional, ossified skill silos. BUT higher education was still available in a way that did not condemme to loan slavery.
I see what your age struggles with - no housing, exorbitant education, zero employer loyalty.
I've thought of selling my house (not able to be a home owner until my 50s) to a young couple at way reduced prices, when I have to move. But, how do I pay for wherever I move next? If I'm lucky, I can die here and leave the sale to someone other than private equity or second homers or short term rentals. I would like that.
There was a big difference between the lives of early baby boomers and late baby boomers. The National Lampoon used to joke about it. We were born in 1951, so we're the head of US Steel. You were born in 1964, so you're stuck as a clerk in a convenience store. Absolutely hilarious. [That was sarcasm.]
Timing is everything
Sorry to be grumpy: I remain a fan. Albeit a grumpy one.
Thanks for the thorough piece. Two thoughts:
1. Assuming global population must be reduced to reduce environmental impact, I also assumed solving the dependency ratio problem would be key to building consensus for reducing populations. Perhaps not, as coming generations may gladly trade a consumerist lifestyle for something simpler?
2. The scuttlebutt from my relatives in mainland China is, the deaths resulting from the move from zero-Covid were welcomed by the government as a crude way to reduce an aging population. A horrible thought, but who knows?
Thanks again.
Why assume population must be reduced to protect the environment? As world population has grown and gotten richer, the environment has improved in many measures.
Hmm, not sure about that. There are a lot of species that are on the verge of extinction and areas on the verge of ecological collapse. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/earth-mass-extinction-60-minutes-2023-01-01/
That program was misinformation featuring the godfather of all mistaken environmental ideas Paul Ehrlich. Some species will go extinct but that’s natural selection and can’t be halted completely. As population grows and becomes richer it also becomes more urban and develops new technologies which will reduce humans impact on the natural environment.
One additional thing that aging could affect is domestic demand. Middle-age people with kids spend a lot of money. Elderly people don’t (possibly even adjusting for the goods/services difference you mention). So an aged country needs foreign markets to absorb production more than a young country does. That could make China more economically dependent on the rest of the world than vice versa, a real political effect!
Elderly people may or may not spend their own money on care -- varies by country -- but they sure consume plenty of it, and it does have to be paid for. (Until we bring slavery back. Just kidding.)
One avenue not explored here is some of the work by people like David Sinclair on epigenetics and mitigating the aging process. What are the implications of making 90 the new 60? If the body at 90 is rejuvenated, would people think and act like 60? Are Sinclair and his cohort all snake oil salesman? Should we be investing in more medical research and clinical trials?