> the ubiquity of birth control might cause humanity to rapidly evolve into a species that just really really loves being around children
This is how population growth accelerates. In the next generation, a higher proportion of kids come from families with 3+ kids. As long as propensity to have more kids is somewhat heritable, when those kids grow up they have more kids than average, and their fraction of the population grows further. Over time, people with a propensity to have more kids become more and more common.
In evolutionary terms, the invention of birth control created a massive selection effect in favor of desire to have kids intentionally, and removed any benefit of traits that produce kids accidentally. Birth control is new enough that evolution hasn't caught up yet.
Propensity to have kids could come from really really loving kids for their own sake, or from an ideology that favors big families (as in some religious communities), or some other effect I can't think of. Whichever reason is most heritable should grow over time in the human population - I hope that really really loving kids will be the answer.
Big assumption is that the propensity to have more kids is heritable, and that the convergence to more people having more of that trait outpaces whatever other factors drive fertility down. Anyway Noah mentioned that at the end - it’s just not that interesting because even if it happens it’s probably many generations away.
Interesting comment. But I am picturing the opening few minutes of Idiocracy. Or will they all be Mormons?
Anecdotal, but plenty of existing people were raised in large families, but do not have them. My stepfather (a spritely 94 year old) was one of ten kids. But, he had only one kid, and his kid (now in his 50s) has none of his own.
No doubt. That was before birth control and abortion on demand. Which as Noah points out have a lot to do with the lowered birthrates. You have to intentionally want a child these days. Also, we have socialized women (and men, too) to not have babies in their late teens and 20s, when they are most fertile.
They won't be Mormons, since they've also seen their fertility rate collapse to well below replacement levels. All evidence points to the Mormons just lagging national trends. They were heavily anti-contraception in the 1980s and that delayed things but now they've lost that battle and are settling near the national average.
Yeah, a rather stark zinger. Even starker is the Quebec folk song by Mes Aïeux – Dégénération. It ends on a hopeful note, but is a harsh send-up of modern life. Example:
Your great-great-grandmother, she had fourteen children
Your great-grandmother had almost as many
And your grandmother had three it was enough
And your mother didn't want any; you were an accident
As for you, my girl, you change partner all the time
When you do something stupid, you get out of it with an abortion
But there are mornings, you wake up crying
When you dream at night of a big table surrounded by kids
Any genetic allele that predisposes people to affirmatively want children, regardless of whether it comes from liking kids as such or another psychological pathway, will be strongly selected for from now on. Alleles that predispose people to not want kids, or make them a lower priority than other life goals, will be selected out. It will be interesting to see how quickly this process unfolds.
Agree with this take, but I think evolution need not play a role at all. Large families in the past often resulted from little/no access to birth control. Large families of the present obviously have that access. It could be religious, or just plain secular altruism (Elon Musk style). But those parents are teaching their kids that large families are good, even if you can opt for no 0-2 children easily. That’s a cultural shift, not an evolutionary one.
I'm late to this conversation, but I wanted to thank you for making this excellent point!
All behavioral traits are at least partly heritable. That's Turkheimer's "first law of behavioral genetics." That surely includes the desire (and propensity) to have children for their own sake. (The heritability of related traits, including religiosity, have already been measured.)
So it seems to me that it's inevitable that, absent an extraordinary streak of bad luck, fertility is destined to rise above replacement, and we'll be back to worrying about overpopulation again.
I wonder if this reasoning should go further. The Malthusian trap is the norm for life on Earth—no species voluntarily limits its population size. In fact, it's an important part of evolution (as Darwin realized)—it's what culls the less-fit organisms. I think we must be living in the middle of a little temporary blip in the evolutionary history of the planet where one species managed to climb out of the Malthusian trap through 1. a wave of technologial innovation that enabled exponential growth in agricultural productivity (automation, nitrogen fertilization, genetic engineering, ...), and 2. contraception. The first is temporary because the planet has finite resources. The second is temporary for the reason you mentioned—homo sapiens will overcome the blight (from the evolutionary perspective) of contraception by "evolving" back to the condition of above-replacement procreation.
This may sound like good news for the species, but if this really is our fate, it's quite bad news for the well-being of individual future humans. Unless we program our new AI overlords to prevent it, a return to the default Malthusian condition would force us into fierce competition for resources, and like all the other animals, most of us will once again be in a state of precarious subsistence.
I'm joking about AI overlords (I hope), but I suspect we'll want to have strict population control of *some* kind in our long-term future. (But for now, by all means, subsidize day-care!)
The best thing we can do for us is to reduce the comparative advantage of spending the first 30 years of your life before starting a family. We are really hitting the limit on slow life strategies.
Are you sure about that? I fear it wouldn't have the macroeconomic effect that you seem to think it would. I don't have any specific data to back up this assertion, but my gut feel is that the majority (and I actually think it's a vast majority) of successful startup businesses get started by people before they've started a family. If that assertion is true, then I'd think the economic effect of "reducing the comparative advantage..." would be negative to overall productivity.
Replying to myself. I actually asked this question at the best place I can think of to get a definitive answer: Hacker News, which is the web site of the startup incubator YCombinator. The definitive answer is that there is no definitive answer. The responses were all over the map, so my conclusion is that the proposition I made is false in terms of startups in that no prediction can be made.
I still question the benefit of reducing the "comparative advantage of spending the first 30 years of your life before starting a family" though. Life in advanced economies has become much more complex and seems to become more complex the more advanced the economy. That is at odds with the goal of producing more children. I really wouldn't like the answer to be to go back to the economic status of, say, 1930.
Indeed, well-said. Notice how nearly all innovation in the world is occurring in those countries where a "slow life strategy" is the norm. And going back to the 1930s is a nonstarter.
Most startups are founded by people who already own homes and have formed families. The home is the primary source of the equity for the majority of startups, with the founder dependent upon the spouse's income initially.
I don't know if the founders with children have less successful startups, but knowing the above, it seems unlikely.
I don’t know if delayed family formation spurs entrepreneurship, but lower population density definitely hinders the specialization that drives productivity growth.
Hey Noah, one thing that's also likely to drive up fertility rates is just being more open to different family arrangements as a society. The correlation between the share of out-of-wedlock births and fertility rates is almost perfect for OECD countries: countries with more traditional family arrangements (as reflected in a lower share of out-of-wedlock births) consistently have lower fertility rates. This is importante because many politicans in the West that are purportedly worried about shrinking populations (like Giorgia Meloni) cannot come with any proposal other than persecuting non-traditional families, which the evidence says are the ones that still can drive births higher. It just points out the whole hypocrisy of the "traditional" family arguments, which by the way want everyone of us to think that a working heterosexual couple living in a small apartment can count of as "traditional".
Oh grow up. Does anyone seriously believe that “recognizing non-traditional families” will have more than .01 impact on TFR, not even accounting for potentially negative second-order effects? If you think non-traditional families deserve recognition (I do) then just argue for it on its own terms.
Going from almost zero share of out-of-wedlock births to near 100 % yields almost 1 additional child per woman... Compare very traditional societies like Spain, Italy and Korea, which have an average TFR of 1, to the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, which have a TFR of around 1.7...
It's still below 2.1, but the decline effect of having a TFR of 1.7 is MUCH milder than having a TFR of near 1
That seems to be an ironic conclusion: only way to keep replacement level fertility is to oppress women.
With urbanization/more options, African women appear to outpace their Asian/European counterparts in fertility. Might be some cultural/genetic component, but good luck sorting through that in this day and age.
In function it would honestly be more of a housing policy allowing more communal arrangements. So many of my friends having children lament the lack of generally available shared care resources. You end up hoping your parents are ready & willing to lend a hand. A lot of us don’t have that option, but would share the responsibilities with friends if given the option
Does the tendency to have children later in life (due to higher rates of university attendance, along with high housing costs) lead to a vicious circle in that the grandparents are far more likely to be too old and frail to help care for their grandchildren, that is if they don't need care themselves?
A good point, my Gen X cousins with children in their tween years are mostly parentless at this point. My generation who are just having kids still have parents, but they are mostly in their early to mid 70s. Multi generational definitely works best when everyone is younger
One of my former economists, Lin Ling Ang did an interesting dissertation on effect of public intervention in Quebec province on birth rates. As I remember the results, Quebec had tried many different policies to try to increase the province’s birth rate. Her research indicated that subsidized child care was important, guaranteeing the women’s job (exactly the same job!) was the most important. Quebec also had a lengthy maternal leave policy. Quebec now has the highest fertility rate in Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Quebec
Quebec's fertility is not highest, but 5th (and statistically tied with Alberta). SK, NU, YK and NT have much higher fertility, Quebec's is much closer to the national average. However, Quebec has gradually risen from 11th to 5th place since the 70s.
What is remarkable about Quebec's fertility levels is that they are nearly the same today as they were in the 70s. Other provinces have fallen much more. However, Quebec had a lot of political instability in the '70s, and had the lowest birth rates among the provinces at that time, which may have made that period an aberration.
Typically, the assumption is that subsidized day care will increase fertility because it increases female workforce participation. It didn't work that way for Quebec. Long term studies found that the other provinces, which didn't create such a program, on average enjoyed even greater gains female work participation in the years following Quebec's implementation.
Partly to blame is that Quebec's implementation (since adopted nationally), destroyed high-quality child care spaces in favour of mediocre ones, and even then, they were mostly only available to middle class families that could spend the time to game the system and get spots - and those families were not the low hanging fruit for female workforce participation.
The gender pay gap is almost entirely a time-off-work tax for women. We have the tech now to allow virtual connectivity, if we pair it with investments in social services and scaled solutions there then we can reduce that a lot. If that gap is smaller, it’s easier for a policy like guaranteed return jobs easier to implement
I really think you’re underselling two important points.
1. This is wonderful wonderful news. Climate change means we’re going to have millions, hundreds of millions of people migrate because through all of humanities history when we can’t live in a place anymore, we move. Anything that makes countries, especially peaceful prosperous countries more likely to take in immigrants instead of shooting them at the border or creating an indenture system is fantastic. And yes, fewer resources needed for fewer people will make a transition easier to a sustainable global economy. We can grow afterwards. But, damn, the idea of getting prosperity and safety for the 8 billion of us, most of whom don’t have that right now? That’s all good news.
2. There’s a lot western wealthy countries could do to make having kids more attractive. I really wanted three kids, but I stopped at two. We could afford it but the thing that really stopped me was that I felt my chances of creating a fulfilling “high status” type of career if I had one more kid would be too low. I think it stops a lot of educated women. More cheap childcare and more convenient child care would help a lot but assurances of respect and flexibility in “good” (intellectually interesting and well compensated) jobs would help a lot too. Of course, then men might ask, why don’t I get that without having to work 70 hours a week? And fair enough, everyone should get that! So we need to change how our “top tier” jobs are structured (while also raising pay for everyone else.)
I think there are a ton of little things in modern life that make having 3 kids kind of suck more than you'd expect. There's a somewhat notorious study about how carseats make it less likely, since having 3 kids -- and likely two of whom are in carseats at least for several years -- usually requires buying a bigger car.
Airlines seating often has 3 or 4 seats adjacent, so a family of 5 is always split up. Having 2 kids share a bed in a hotel is fine. 3 means someone gets a foldable cot or sleeps on the couch. Restaurants have 90% of their seating for 4 or fewer guests. You can have 2 kids share a room for years on end; three is much harder given usual bedroom sizes.
Lots of little frictions like that add up, for the families I know at least.
I have 4 kids. Our society is very much built around assumptions for no more than 2. I fear that soon that will evolve to be 1, then zero.
Carseats are a pain, especially as I had terrible back trouble during my 30s. Many jurisdictions make carseats mandatory to age 8 or more, even though the effect is not statistically significant beyond age 2. I am so glad we graduated out of that hell last year.
My fear is that low fertility is made up of thousands of these kinds of papercuts that are ultimately a lot harder to fix than "give parental leave" or "make childcare free".
Not only is it dozens of small problems, rather than one big one amenable to a single piece of federal legislation, but many of them it isn't clear how government could intervene. Are they going to mandate that all restaurants dedicate 40% of their space to tables for 5+ people to accommodate that 2.1 fertility rate? Seems pretty implausible.
And things are getting worse. Restaurants and hotels banning children is becoming more prevalent, a sign of a decrepit population. Rising prevalence of one-bedroom and studio dwellings, while 3 bedrooms or more becomes more rare.
It's relatively easy to discriminate against children too, because often their status as minors isn't protected legally, there are exceptions often carved out to specifically allow discrimination against minors.
"And yes, fewer resources needed for fewer people will make a transition easier to a sustainable global economy. We can grow afterwards. But, damn, the idea of getting prosperity and safety for the 8 billion of us, most of whom don’t have that right now? That’s all good news."
I think Noah has written about this elsewhere but I don't think this works out unless you keep most of those people "without prosperity" poor which defeats the idea. If 5 billion people all had the US standard of living and consumption of the mid 2000's the climate would probably be doomed. So we either need to innovate our way to greener growth, keep the third world in terrible poverty, or get rid of a *lot* more people then low birthrates would
Well lower population helps. There is no way it’s not easier to achieve prosperity for 5 billion instead of 8 billion. No, it’s not a magic bullet, we still need to do a lot of transition and innovation.
in abstract yes but It won't matter if you're not planning on killing a bunch of people or keeping them in poverty. You don't get substantially lower population through lower birthrate unless youre looking at a several generation timescale, and we need to act much faster then that.
Considering climate change degrades modal life everywhere on the planet, and most people can't move, we'd be better off paying to abate things where people are now, rather than using this to justify mass immigration, which has plenty of other negative issues to sort through.
Great article ! You forgot one important point though : having less people also means having less ideas, and so less innovation. It will slow down technological progress, so growth, and will make us way poorer in the long term...
AI could save the day here too, but unless the Singularity happens, AI + not so many humans will mean less technological advances than AI + many humans.
This is a specious argument. The great innovations which form the foundation of our modern society and technology were all generated when the population of earth was a small fraction of what it is today. Conversely, there will be fewer people to oppose the adoption of new ideas.
Interesting point, the research ive see is around cities v suburban/rural innovation, which is more about lots of different perspectives living together than sheer numbers. I wonder if there’s a size effect as well? Is nyc “more innovative” than SF because it has over 2x the pop? Maybe, would be interesting to see
I'm not sure that the city scale is the right one, I think we need to look more at the scale of a country, and even of humanity.
And of course, the sheer number of people isn't enough by itself. If it were, India would be the most innovative country in the world.
But three major factors in the acceleration of technological progress are 1) the fact that we've gone from 1 billion human beings in 1800 to 8 billion today 2) while the percentage of people employed in agriculture has fallen in Western countries from around 90% to around 2% in the same timeframe, and 3) the literacy rate exceeded 90% at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th century.
That's many, many more educated brains thinking up solutions to our problems.
Here's an idea: in addition to expanded child tax credits, make the retirement age lower for people who have kids. Like maybe raise it 5 years right away, and keep hiking it faster than we have been, but make it 3 years lower for every child someone has, up to a maximum of 3 children and 9 years earlier retirement.
Having children means giving up a lot of fun, freedom and prosperity in your prime years– maybe people would like that trade-off better if they could have more fun in their later years.
"Or something weirder may happen — the ubiquity of birth control might cause humanity to rapidly evolve into a species that just really really loves being around children, since only the people with some sort of deep innate love of kids will choose to have lots of them."
Everyone else is offering thoughtful, serious takes, so I will lean into my identity as someone who would *love* this future and offer a more playful (but still earnest) response.
First, this would be an awesome future. I spent four summers as a camp counselor and had a brief career as an elementary school teacher, and the happy hours I had with my colleagues offered a glimpse into a world in which a kid-friendly future would even make adult spaces more fun.
Second... I think we have a cultural deficit in imagining kid-centered futures. Lots of science fiction doesn't know how to handle kids, so makes them super-precocious and adult-like, projections of 20-something angst, recipients of intense trauma, or entirely absent. Where's the science fiction that shows me a super-cool playground in space???
maybe a bit nitpicky, but we don't necessarily have to get people to $1M/year/household for them to have kids at around 2-2.5-perhaps we only need to get the fully loaded cost of having kids to be negligible for most people as it is for the very rich. That would surely be a lot cheaper.
It's probably at least two full time above average incomes. Not achievable by many, and those who do are often in high cost cities. Say $250k, but yes not $1m. It would allow to hire help for the mother to work near full time. Most mothers at that range would want to buy the time to continue professional career development while raising kids.
I mean, empirically, it's possible on a lot less than $250K, even in SF (where both my in-laws and I live). And I don't think denominating it in dollars even makes that much sense-if SFUSD provided pre-k along with TK and K-12, that would make parenting in SF substantially easier. OFC, for this to work we'd either have to give some kind of voucher that could be used on childcare/child healthcare/etc., or actually develop the state capacity to do things cost-effectively, which SF in particular is poor at.
Exactly, the big missing link here is the tech revolution in both childcare and eldercare recently that must help drive down costs for both exponentially. Not every country is like the US and can just flip a switch to increase subsidies or immigration. The desperation of countries bleeding population is driving advancements even without explicit US policy backing
Back before modern health care, half of your kids died young. As Brad DeLong points out, you really did want lots of babies, to be sure at least one son would live to adulthood and look out for you.
To be sure of an adult surviving son -- and in most premodern societies, you really did need a son -- you needed six or eight babies.
People had lots of babies not just because of "fun" with little birth control, but the grim logic of childhood disease and adult violence.
Adult sons were a critical asset. Only lots of babies would reliably get you one.
Another factor was that for most of human history most society was agrarian. Children were critical as a labor supply in those circumstances. This is much rarer in modern society, although can still occur. My father, a veterinarian, faced a problem when my brother and I went off to college. He calculated that he could do better abandoning his practice and going to work for the state than to hire someone to do the work we had been doing in his practice - and he had 4 more children to get through college.
It's not so helpful a reminder for modern industrial societies. Yes, everyone is selfish, but having kids is the most altruistic action most people will ever take, at least measured in terms of time.
People who choose to not have enough children to replace themselves may not be explicitly acting selfishly, but they are trading less effort for no personal commensurate consequence, and are dependent upon others to provide everyone with the societal benefits that children bring (healthier economies among them).
I cannot believe you wrote this entire essay without mentioning housing. The price of family-sized housing has gone up 4-5x nationally in the last 20 years and wages haven’t. I’m sure that there is no silver bullet, but if we don’t fix housing, there’s no hope of anything else working.
Actually, I'd rather fix working class wages than housing. The problem is mostly that the working class has flat-lined or lost ground, as much as (or more than) as housing has gotten too expensive.
"We've tried nothing" when Noah links to a survey paper about how over 50 countries, including 60% of Europe and 38% of Asia, have tried hundreds of different policies over decades.......
You look at those policies and the effect that we’re trying to measure and tell me with a straight face that you think any change would even be detectable.
The big hole in this post is the boom in tech revolving around these issues, with healthcare on the one side and childcare on the other. Reducing not just the cost but also time investment both both is paramount. Not every country can wave a magic wand to increase immigration or subsidize every part of the process. The costs must go down, and recent tech advancement are promising
One thing that really limits families is the astronomical cost of housing in most of the Western world. When each additional bedroom adds 200,000 or more to the cost of your house, you have a huge incentive to limit your family size. I suspect the large increase in the cost of rent in the US since 2010 has a lot to do with our drop in fertility rates.
When populations start having meaningful drops (hasn't happened yet, even in the East Asian low-fertility countries) that will pull down housing prices and reduce that huge burden on child rearing families. So this will self-correct to some extent.
Isn't the cost of housing astronomical in many Western countries precisely because it has become the chief financial asset of the baby boomer generation, which now votes for whoever will help protect its valuation?
But by the time population drops enough, there will be construction and factory worker scarcity, bringing the wages up, negating the drop in land prices.
No need to build more housing when the population is actually shrinking, so construction wages are irrelevant.
The "worker shortage" is greatly overblown. There will be more elderly per worker, but fewer children, and the dependency ratio ends up almost the same at TFR 1 as it does at TFR 2. We are currently in a situation with an unsustainably low dependency ratio, because during the demographic transition the % of children drops decades before the % of elderly goes up. But that was always unsustainable. The inevitable return to a normal dependency ratio is being spun as some horrible disaster that needs to be avoided when it's not a disaster and there's no way to avoid it anyway.
Fun fact - if TFR went back up to 2.1 the dependency ratio would be markedly WORSE for about 40 years, and then it ends up almost *exactly the same* as if we stayed around 1.6 (it's *very slightly* better, no more).
It is important to note that the problems that accompany declining global populations are transitory. As you discuss, the eventual equilibrium birthrate should be close to replacement level, since babies are valuable to society, and so society will reward family formation (up to replacement level birthrates).
Regarding an aging workforce: delayed retirement can be a positive development if properly implemented. It can reduce the ongoing ‘loneliness epidemic’, and if paired with part-time employment, enhance senior well-being.
The Japan example shows the conflict between a growing global population and a declining national population. In this transitory situation, immigration can bolster the existing workforce (Japan is apparently pursuing pro-immigration policies). And once national and global birthrates are more in sync, the impact of an aging workforce is diminished. [Increased immigration into industrialized countries will also accommodate those fleeing climate change hardships]
With ongoing gains in technology, it is not clear that individual workloads will increase. Rather, the market for skilled labor will increase, further encouraging global education efforts. So overall, toil should not increase, and living standards should not decline.
What probably will decline are physical asset valuations. For example, homes: fewer people bidding for the existing home inventory suggests declining home prices overall. Existing real estate will be converted into other uses (urban agriculture, renewable energy arrays, recreation areas, eco-restoration projects, etc). This is not necessarily deflationary; a car salesman might change careers and become an urban forester.
But we need global institutions to create value for these emerging economic sectors. For instance, once we establish global exchange markets for carbon and biodiversity, eco-restoration activities will have economic value. Eco-restoration will provide satisfying jobs that are resistant to automation, and will be largely unaffected by global population levels.
This is about as close to a dystopian society as you can get imo. This is a society where more people are in adult diapers than baby diapers(already the case ih Japan) where youth culture contracts every year, kids have less and less opportunities to make friends or meet anyone new, and the promise of a better tomorrow and new ideas slowly fade into memory, where playgrounds sit empty, and society becomes trapped in a nostalgia trip. And unless you can boost fertility rates above 2.1, it's terminal for humanity. I can't see how societies retain any sense of optimism here, when the writing is on the wall that society is doomed unless they turn this around. Groups like the Amish, Hasidic Jews or Mormons probably become much more important in a world like this, but who knows what that world would look like. More rural? Less educated? Happier? More family-oriented??
The whole argument about it being better for the environment is disingenuous to me, because switching to less meat intensive diets, limiting sprawl, and switching to energy sources that have a higher energy density like nuclear power would free up tons of land for habitat preservation, and none of that would require population decline.
Kids are expensive, not only in childcare, but in many other categories as well. Have cash subsidies in other countries not helped at all?
My other thought is that having an only child is not ideal. The lifetime value of siblings to each other can be tremendous. Is there any research on the life satisfaction of only children vs. other children?
“Oh look we gave a child subsidy of $12, I guess nothing works and we’re doomed.” I don’t get how this passes for analysis. Not blaming Noah - he’s just summarizing what little research is out there. The one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that when this crisis becomes more acute, societies will become *much* more creative in addressing it.
If we don't solve this, humanity is toast seems like a pretty big incentive. Over hundreds of years, a fertility rate of 1.0 means every generation is half the size of the preceding one.
> the ubiquity of birth control might cause humanity to rapidly evolve into a species that just really really loves being around children
This is how population growth accelerates. In the next generation, a higher proportion of kids come from families with 3+ kids. As long as propensity to have more kids is somewhat heritable, when those kids grow up they have more kids than average, and their fraction of the population grows further. Over time, people with a propensity to have more kids become more and more common.
In evolutionary terms, the invention of birth control created a massive selection effect in favor of desire to have kids intentionally, and removed any benefit of traits that produce kids accidentally. Birth control is new enough that evolution hasn't caught up yet.
Propensity to have kids could come from really really loving kids for their own sake, or from an ideology that favors big families (as in some religious communities), or some other effect I can't think of. Whichever reason is most heritable should grow over time in the human population - I hope that really really loving kids will be the answer.
Big assumption is that the propensity to have more kids is heritable, and that the convergence to more people having more of that trait outpaces whatever other factors drive fertility down. Anyway Noah mentioned that at the end - it’s just not that interesting because even if it happens it’s probably many generations away.
𝘉𝘪𝘨 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘬𝘪𝘥𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦...
Seems reasonable. Appears that some ethnic/racial groups maintain higher fertility in the face of modern pressures to be sterile.
...𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯.
Good point. Even "super-breeders" might be crushed by the modern sterility juggernaut.
Interesting comment. But I am picturing the opening few minutes of Idiocracy. Or will they all be Mormons?
Anecdotal, but plenty of existing people were raised in large families, but do not have them. My stepfather (a spritely 94 year old) was one of ten kids. But, he had only one kid, and his kid (now in his 50s) has none of his own.
At 94 his siblings were probably not all intentional.
No doubt. That was before birth control and abortion on demand. Which as Noah points out have a lot to do with the lowered birthrates. You have to intentionally want a child these days. Also, we have socialized women (and men, too) to not have babies in their late teens and 20s, when they are most fertile.
𝘈𝘭𝘴𝘰, 𝘸𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯 (𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘦𝘯, 𝘵𝘰𝘰) 𝘵𝘰 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 20𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘦.
Bingo.
They won't be Mormons, since they've also seen their fertility rate collapse to well below replacement levels. All evidence points to the Mormons just lagging national trends. They were heavily anti-contraception in the 1980s and that delayed things but now they've lost that battle and are settling near the national average.
https://religionnews.com/2019/06/15/the-incredible-shrinking-mormon-american-family/
𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘐 𝘢𝘮 𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘦𝘸 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘐𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺.
Yeah, a rather stark zinger. Even starker is the Quebec folk song by Mes Aïeux – Dégénération. It ends on a hopeful note, but is a harsh send-up of modern life. Example:
Your great-great-grandmother, she had fourteen children
Your great-grandmother had almost as many
And your grandmother had three it was enough
And your mother didn't want any; you were an accident
As for you, my girl, you change partner all the time
When you do something stupid, you get out of it with an abortion
But there are mornings, you wake up crying
When you dream at night of a big table surrounded by kids
Any genetic allele that predisposes people to affirmatively want children, regardless of whether it comes from liking kids as such or another psychological pathway, will be strongly selected for from now on. Alleles that predispose people to not want kids, or make them a lower priority than other life goals, will be selected out. It will be interesting to see how quickly this process unfolds.
Agree with this take, but I think evolution need not play a role at all. Large families in the past often resulted from little/no access to birth control. Large families of the present obviously have that access. It could be religious, or just plain secular altruism (Elon Musk style). But those parents are teaching their kids that large families are good, even if you can opt for no 0-2 children easily. That’s a cultural shift, not an evolutionary one.
Indeed, the "problem" is at least largely self-correcting.
I'm late to this conversation, but I wanted to thank you for making this excellent point!
All behavioral traits are at least partly heritable. That's Turkheimer's "first law of behavioral genetics." That surely includes the desire (and propensity) to have children for their own sake. (The heritability of related traits, including religiosity, have already been measured.)
So it seems to me that it's inevitable that, absent an extraordinary streak of bad luck, fertility is destined to rise above replacement, and we'll be back to worrying about overpopulation again.
I wonder if this reasoning should go further. The Malthusian trap is the norm for life on Earth—no species voluntarily limits its population size. In fact, it's an important part of evolution (as Darwin realized)—it's what culls the less-fit organisms. I think we must be living in the middle of a little temporary blip in the evolutionary history of the planet where one species managed to climb out of the Malthusian trap through 1. a wave of technologial innovation that enabled exponential growth in agricultural productivity (automation, nitrogen fertilization, genetic engineering, ...), and 2. contraception. The first is temporary because the planet has finite resources. The second is temporary for the reason you mentioned—homo sapiens will overcome the blight (from the evolutionary perspective) of contraception by "evolving" back to the condition of above-replacement procreation.
This may sound like good news for the species, but if this really is our fate, it's quite bad news for the well-being of individual future humans. Unless we program our new AI overlords to prevent it, a return to the default Malthusian condition would force us into fierce competition for resources, and like all the other animals, most of us will once again be in a state of precarious subsistence.
I'm joking about AI overlords (I hope), but I suspect we'll want to have strict population control of *some* kind in our long-term future. (But for now, by all means, subsidize day-care!)
The best thing we can do for us is to reduce the comparative advantage of spending the first 30 years of your life before starting a family. We are really hitting the limit on slow life strategies.
Are you sure about that? I fear it wouldn't have the macroeconomic effect that you seem to think it would. I don't have any specific data to back up this assertion, but my gut feel is that the majority (and I actually think it's a vast majority) of successful startup businesses get started by people before they've started a family. If that assertion is true, then I'd think the economic effect of "reducing the comparative advantage..." would be negative to overall productivity.
Replying to myself. I actually asked this question at the best place I can think of to get a definitive answer: Hacker News, which is the web site of the startup incubator YCombinator. The definitive answer is that there is no definitive answer. The responses were all over the map, so my conclusion is that the proposition I made is false in terms of startups in that no prediction can be made.
I still question the benefit of reducing the "comparative advantage of spending the first 30 years of your life before starting a family" though. Life in advanced economies has become much more complex and seems to become more complex the more advanced the economy. That is at odds with the goal of producing more children. I really wouldn't like the answer to be to go back to the economic status of, say, 1930.
Indeed, well-said. Notice how nearly all innovation in the world is occurring in those countries where a "slow life strategy" is the norm. And going back to the 1930s is a nonstarter.
The average age of successful startup founders is probably around 45, and most people have started a family by then. https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45
Thanks for the link. Very sensible conclusions, and they dovetail nicely with my own suspicions. Experience is vastly underrated in current society.
Not sure start-ups are a significant part of the pool of family-formers.
But if there is a choice between kids and economic growth, it's time to start voting for kids.
Most startups are founded by people who already own homes and have formed families. The home is the primary source of the equity for the majority of startups, with the founder dependent upon the spouse's income initially.
I don't know if the founders with children have less successful startups, but knowing the above, it seems unlikely.
I don’t know if delayed family formation spurs entrepreneurship, but lower population density definitely hinders the specialization that drives productivity growth.
And how exactly would you go about doing that? (Without resorting to coercion or otherwise blatantly violating individual rights, that is.)
Hey Noah, one thing that's also likely to drive up fertility rates is just being more open to different family arrangements as a society. The correlation between the share of out-of-wedlock births and fertility rates is almost perfect for OECD countries: countries with more traditional family arrangements (as reflected in a lower share of out-of-wedlock births) consistently have lower fertility rates. This is importante because many politicans in the West that are purportedly worried about shrinking populations (like Giorgia Meloni) cannot come with any proposal other than persecuting non-traditional families, which the evidence says are the ones that still can drive births higher. It just points out the whole hypocrisy of the "traditional" family arguments, which by the way want everyone of us to think that a working heterosexual couple living in a small apartment can count of as "traditional".
Oh grow up. Does anyone seriously believe that “recognizing non-traditional families” will have more than .01 impact on TFR, not even accounting for potentially negative second-order effects? If you think non-traditional families deserve recognition (I do) then just argue for it on its own terms.
The effect is not 0.01
Going from almost zero share of out-of-wedlock births to near 100 % yields almost 1 additional child per woman... Compare very traditional societies like Spain, Italy and Korea, which have an average TFR of 1, to the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, which have a TFR of around 1.7...
It's still below 2.1, but the decline effect of having a TFR of 1.7 is MUCH milder than having a TFR of near 1
Not sure the difference between Nordics/Southern Med -- Korea is in acceptance of non-traditional marriage.
Worldwide, seems traditional marriage land outpaces new hotness land, c.f. Islam, African village.
I wonder how much African and Muslim countries (and to a lesser extent India) have high birth rates primarily due to the oppression of women?
That seems to be an ironic conclusion: only way to keep replacement level fertility is to oppress women.
With urbanization/more options, African women appear to outpace their Asian/European counterparts in fertility. Might be some cultural/genetic component, but good luck sorting through that in this day and age.
Very interesting.
In function it would honestly be more of a housing policy allowing more communal arrangements. So many of my friends having children lament the lack of generally available shared care resources. You end up hoping your parents are ready & willing to lend a hand. A lot of us don’t have that option, but would share the responsibilities with friends if given the option
Does the tendency to have children later in life (due to higher rates of university attendance, along with high housing costs) lead to a vicious circle in that the grandparents are far more likely to be too old and frail to help care for their grandchildren, that is if they don't need care themselves?
A good point, my Gen X cousins with children in their tween years are mostly parentless at this point. My generation who are just having kids still have parents, but they are mostly in their early to mid 70s. Multi generational definitely works best when everyone is younger
One of my former economists, Lin Ling Ang did an interesting dissertation on effect of public intervention in Quebec province on birth rates. As I remember the results, Quebec had tried many different policies to try to increase the province’s birth rate. Her research indicated that subsidized child care was important, guaranteeing the women’s job (exactly the same job!) was the most important. Quebec also had a lengthy maternal leave policy. Quebec now has the highest fertility rate in Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Quebec
Quebec's fertility is not highest, but 5th (and statistically tied with Alberta). SK, NU, YK and NT have much higher fertility, Quebec's is much closer to the national average. However, Quebec has gradually risen from 11th to 5th place since the 70s.
What is remarkable about Quebec's fertility levels is that they are nearly the same today as they were in the 70s. Other provinces have fallen much more. However, Quebec had a lot of political instability in the '70s, and had the lowest birth rates among the provinces at that time, which may have made that period an aberration.
Typically, the assumption is that subsidized day care will increase fertility because it increases female workforce participation. It didn't work that way for Quebec. Long term studies found that the other provinces, which didn't create such a program, on average enjoyed even greater gains female work participation in the years following Quebec's implementation.
Partly to blame is that Quebec's implementation (since adopted nationally), destroyed high-quality child care spaces in favour of mediocre ones, and even then, they were mostly only available to middle class families that could spend the time to game the system and get spots - and those families were not the low hanging fruit for female workforce participation.
Nice follow up. Thanks.
The gender pay gap is almost entirely a time-off-work tax for women. We have the tech now to allow virtual connectivity, if we pair it with investments in social services and scaled solutions there then we can reduce that a lot. If that gap is smaller, it’s easier for a policy like guaranteed return jobs easier to implement
I really think you’re underselling two important points.
1. This is wonderful wonderful news. Climate change means we’re going to have millions, hundreds of millions of people migrate because through all of humanities history when we can’t live in a place anymore, we move. Anything that makes countries, especially peaceful prosperous countries more likely to take in immigrants instead of shooting them at the border or creating an indenture system is fantastic. And yes, fewer resources needed for fewer people will make a transition easier to a sustainable global economy. We can grow afterwards. But, damn, the idea of getting prosperity and safety for the 8 billion of us, most of whom don’t have that right now? That’s all good news.
2. There’s a lot western wealthy countries could do to make having kids more attractive. I really wanted three kids, but I stopped at two. We could afford it but the thing that really stopped me was that I felt my chances of creating a fulfilling “high status” type of career if I had one more kid would be too low. I think it stops a lot of educated women. More cheap childcare and more convenient child care would help a lot but assurances of respect and flexibility in “good” (intellectually interesting and well compensated) jobs would help a lot too. Of course, then men might ask, why don’t I get that without having to work 70 hours a week? And fair enough, everyone should get that! So we need to change how our “top tier” jobs are structured (while also raising pay for everyone else.)
I think there are a ton of little things in modern life that make having 3 kids kind of suck more than you'd expect. There's a somewhat notorious study about how carseats make it less likely, since having 3 kids -- and likely two of whom are in carseats at least for several years -- usually requires buying a bigger car.
Airlines seating often has 3 or 4 seats adjacent, so a family of 5 is always split up. Having 2 kids share a bed in a hotel is fine. 3 means someone gets a foldable cot or sleeps on the couch. Restaurants have 90% of their seating for 4 or fewer guests. You can have 2 kids share a room for years on end; three is much harder given usual bedroom sizes.
Lots of little frictions like that add up, for the families I know at least.
I have 4 kids. Our society is very much built around assumptions for no more than 2. I fear that soon that will evolve to be 1, then zero.
Carseats are a pain, especially as I had terrible back trouble during my 30s. Many jurisdictions make carseats mandatory to age 8 or more, even though the effect is not statistically significant beyond age 2. I am so glad we graduated out of that hell last year.
My fear is that low fertility is made up of thousands of these kinds of papercuts that are ultimately a lot harder to fix than "give parental leave" or "make childcare free".
Not only is it dozens of small problems, rather than one big one amenable to a single piece of federal legislation, but many of them it isn't clear how government could intervene. Are they going to mandate that all restaurants dedicate 40% of their space to tables for 5+ people to accommodate that 2.1 fertility rate? Seems pretty implausible.
And things are getting worse. Restaurants and hotels banning children is becoming more prevalent, a sign of a decrepit population. Rising prevalence of one-bedroom and studio dwellings, while 3 bedrooms or more becomes more rare.
It's relatively easy to discriminate against children too, because often their status as minors isn't protected legally, there are exceptions often carved out to specifically allow discrimination against minors.
"And yes, fewer resources needed for fewer people will make a transition easier to a sustainable global economy. We can grow afterwards. But, damn, the idea of getting prosperity and safety for the 8 billion of us, most of whom don’t have that right now? That’s all good news."
I think Noah has written about this elsewhere but I don't think this works out unless you keep most of those people "without prosperity" poor which defeats the idea. If 5 billion people all had the US standard of living and consumption of the mid 2000's the climate would probably be doomed. So we either need to innovate our way to greener growth, keep the third world in terrible poverty, or get rid of a *lot* more people then low birthrates would
Well lower population helps. There is no way it’s not easier to achieve prosperity for 5 billion instead of 8 billion. No, it’s not a magic bullet, we still need to do a lot of transition and innovation.
in abstract yes but It won't matter if you're not planning on killing a bunch of people or keeping them in poverty. You don't get substantially lower population through lower birthrate unless youre looking at a several generation timescale, and we need to act much faster then that.
𝘊𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦... 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴
Considering climate change degrades modal life everywhere on the planet, and most people can't move, we'd be better off paying to abate things where people are now, rather than using this to justify mass immigration, which has plenty of other negative issues to sort through.
Great article ! You forgot one important point though : having less people also means having less ideas, and so less innovation. It will slow down technological progress, so growth, and will make us way poorer in the long term...
AI could save the day here too, but unless the Singularity happens, AI + not so many humans will mean less technological advances than AI + many humans.
This is a specious argument. The great innovations which form the foundation of our modern society and technology were all generated when the population of earth was a small fraction of what it is today. Conversely, there will be fewer people to oppose the adoption of new ideas.
Interesting point, the research ive see is around cities v suburban/rural innovation, which is more about lots of different perspectives living together than sheer numbers. I wonder if there’s a size effect as well? Is nyc “more innovative” than SF because it has over 2x the pop? Maybe, would be interesting to see
I'm not sure that the city scale is the right one, I think we need to look more at the scale of a country, and even of humanity.
And of course, the sheer number of people isn't enough by itself. If it were, India would be the most innovative country in the world.
But three major factors in the acceleration of technological progress are 1) the fact that we've gone from 1 billion human beings in 1800 to 8 billion today 2) while the percentage of people employed in agriculture has fallen in Western countries from around 90% to around 2% in the same timeframe, and 3) the literacy rate exceeded 90% at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th century.
That's many, many more educated brains thinking up solutions to our problems.
Not sure we are out pacing earlier eras, innovation-wise. Much of today's "new" stuff is a sideways shift, or arguably a downgrade.
Wars and various political arrangements seem to have a large effect on innovation. Most was from European descended people until recently.
Catty comment. Would we really miss great ideas if we had 7 billion people instead of 8? At the margin I wouldn’t think we’d lose a lot.
Here's an idea: in addition to expanded child tax credits, make the retirement age lower for people who have kids. Like maybe raise it 5 years right away, and keep hiking it faster than we have been, but make it 3 years lower for every child someone has, up to a maximum of 3 children and 9 years earlier retirement.
Having children means giving up a lot of fun, freedom and prosperity in your prime years– maybe people would like that trade-off better if they could have more fun in their later years.
Wow! I really like that one, John, and I've never heard it before. Creative strategy.
"Or something weirder may happen — the ubiquity of birth control might cause humanity to rapidly evolve into a species that just really really loves being around children, since only the people with some sort of deep innate love of kids will choose to have lots of them."
Everyone else is offering thoughtful, serious takes, so I will lean into my identity as someone who would *love* this future and offer a more playful (but still earnest) response.
First, this would be an awesome future. I spent four summers as a camp counselor and had a brief career as an elementary school teacher, and the happy hours I had with my colleagues offered a glimpse into a world in which a kid-friendly future would even make adult spaces more fun.
Second... I think we have a cultural deficit in imagining kid-centered futures. Lots of science fiction doesn't know how to handle kids, so makes them super-precocious and adult-like, projections of 20-something angst, recipients of intense trauma, or entirely absent. Where's the science fiction that shows me a super-cool playground in space???
Plenty of kids in the Culture.
Thanks for the rec! I'll check it out.
...𝘢 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳-𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘭 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘦?
I remember reading Heinlein's juvenile novels in eighth grade. Are such a thing anymore?
Also on the lighter side, maybe instead of a military draft, we need a procreation draft...
maybe a bit nitpicky, but we don't necessarily have to get people to $1M/year/household for them to have kids at around 2-2.5-perhaps we only need to get the fully loaded cost of having kids to be negligible for most people as it is for the very rich. That would surely be a lot cheaper.
It's probably at least two full time above average incomes. Not achievable by many, and those who do are often in high cost cities. Say $250k, but yes not $1m. It would allow to hire help for the mother to work near full time. Most mothers at that range would want to buy the time to continue professional career development while raising kids.
I mean, empirically, it's possible on a lot less than $250K, even in SF (where both my in-laws and I live). And I don't think denominating it in dollars even makes that much sense-if SFUSD provided pre-k along with TK and K-12, that would make parenting in SF substantially easier. OFC, for this to work we'd either have to give some kind of voucher that could be used on childcare/child healthcare/etc., or actually develop the state capacity to do things cost-effectively, which SF in particular is poor at.
And high quality free aftercare.
Exactly, the big missing link here is the tech revolution in both childcare and eldercare recently that must help drive down costs for both exponentially. Not every country is like the US and can just flip a switch to increase subsidies or immigration. The desperation of countries bleeding population is driving advancements even without explicit US policy backing
Back before modern health care, half of your kids died young. As Brad DeLong points out, you really did want lots of babies, to be sure at least one son would live to adulthood and look out for you.
To be sure of an adult surviving son -- and in most premodern societies, you really did need a son -- you needed six or eight babies.
People had lots of babies not just because of "fun" with little birth control, but the grim logic of childhood disease and adult violence.
Adult sons were a critical asset. Only lots of babies would reliably get you one.
Another factor was that for most of human history most society was agrarian. Children were critical as a labor supply in those circumstances. This is much rarer in modern society, although can still occur. My father, a veterinarian, faced a problem when my brother and I went off to college. He calculated that he could do better abandoning his practice and going to work for the state than to hire someone to do the work we had been doing in his practice - and he had 4 more children to get through college.
It's not so helpful a reminder for modern industrial societies. Yes, everyone is selfish, but having kids is the most altruistic action most people will ever take, at least measured in terms of time.
People who choose to not have enough children to replace themselves may not be explicitly acting selfishly, but they are trading less effort for no personal commensurate consequence, and are dependent upon others to provide everyone with the societal benefits that children bring (healthier economies among them).
I cannot believe you wrote this entire essay without mentioning housing. The price of family-sized housing has gone up 4-5x nationally in the last 20 years and wages haven’t. I’m sure that there is no silver bullet, but if we don’t fix housing, there’s no hope of anything else working.
Actually, I'd rather fix working class wages than housing. The problem is mostly that the working class has flat-lined or lost ground, as much as (or more than) as housing has gotten too expensive.
If you can increase wages 5x in 20 years, the way housing has increased in some places, then I would vote for you for president.
How though?
Good point.
We skipped pretty quickly from “we’ve tried nothing” to “we’re all out of ideas” on this one.
"We've tried nothing" when Noah links to a survey paper about how over 50 countries, including 60% of Europe and 38% of Asia, have tried hundreds of different policies over decades.......
You look at those policies and the effect that we’re trying to measure and tell me with a straight face that you think any change would even be detectable.
The big hole in this post is the boom in tech revolving around these issues, with healthcare on the one side and childcare on the other. Reducing not just the cost but also time investment both both is paramount. Not every country can wave a magic wand to increase immigration or subsidize every part of the process. The costs must go down, and recent tech advancement are promising
One thing that really limits families is the astronomical cost of housing in most of the Western world. When each additional bedroom adds 200,000 or more to the cost of your house, you have a huge incentive to limit your family size. I suspect the large increase in the cost of rent in the US since 2010 has a lot to do with our drop in fertility rates.
When populations start having meaningful drops (hasn't happened yet, even in the East Asian low-fertility countries) that will pull down housing prices and reduce that huge burden on child rearing families. So this will self-correct to some extent.
Isn't the cost of housing astronomical in many Western countries precisely because it has become the chief financial asset of the baby boomer generation, which now votes for whoever will help protect its valuation?
And for some reason, there is not market (or is there some funny building code reason?) for "family size" apartments and condos.
But by the time population drops enough, there will be construction and factory worker scarcity, bringing the wages up, negating the drop in land prices.
No need to build more housing when the population is actually shrinking, so construction wages are irrelevant.
The "worker shortage" is greatly overblown. There will be more elderly per worker, but fewer children, and the dependency ratio ends up almost the same at TFR 1 as it does at TFR 2. We are currently in a situation with an unsustainably low dependency ratio, because during the demographic transition the % of children drops decades before the % of elderly goes up. But that was always unsustainable. The inevitable return to a normal dependency ratio is being spun as some horrible disaster that needs to be avoided when it's not a disaster and there's no way to avoid it anyway.
Fun fact - if TFR went back up to 2.1 the dependency ratio would be markedly WORSE for about 40 years, and then it ends up almost *exactly the same* as if we stayed around 1.6 (it's *very slightly* better, no more).
Do NIMBYs cause high housing costs, or do high land prices fuel NIMBYism?
[Warning: Non-economist spitballing ahead!]
It is important to note that the problems that accompany declining global populations are transitory. As you discuss, the eventual equilibrium birthrate should be close to replacement level, since babies are valuable to society, and so society will reward family formation (up to replacement level birthrates).
Regarding an aging workforce: delayed retirement can be a positive development if properly implemented. It can reduce the ongoing ‘loneliness epidemic’, and if paired with part-time employment, enhance senior well-being.
The Japan example shows the conflict between a growing global population and a declining national population. In this transitory situation, immigration can bolster the existing workforce (Japan is apparently pursuing pro-immigration policies). And once national and global birthrates are more in sync, the impact of an aging workforce is diminished. [Increased immigration into industrialized countries will also accommodate those fleeing climate change hardships]
With ongoing gains in technology, it is not clear that individual workloads will increase. Rather, the market for skilled labor will increase, further encouraging global education efforts. So overall, toil should not increase, and living standards should not decline.
What probably will decline are physical asset valuations. For example, homes: fewer people bidding for the existing home inventory suggests declining home prices overall. Existing real estate will be converted into other uses (urban agriculture, renewable energy arrays, recreation areas, eco-restoration projects, etc). This is not necessarily deflationary; a car salesman might change careers and become an urban forester.
But we need global institutions to create value for these emerging economic sectors. For instance, once we establish global exchange markets for carbon and biodiversity, eco-restoration activities will have economic value. Eco-restoration will provide satisfying jobs that are resistant to automation, and will be largely unaffected by global population levels.
This is about as close to a dystopian society as you can get imo. This is a society where more people are in adult diapers than baby diapers(already the case ih Japan) where youth culture contracts every year, kids have less and less opportunities to make friends or meet anyone new, and the promise of a better tomorrow and new ideas slowly fade into memory, where playgrounds sit empty, and society becomes trapped in a nostalgia trip. And unless you can boost fertility rates above 2.1, it's terminal for humanity. I can't see how societies retain any sense of optimism here, when the writing is on the wall that society is doomed unless they turn this around. Groups like the Amish, Hasidic Jews or Mormons probably become much more important in a world like this, but who knows what that world would look like. More rural? Less educated? Happier? More family-oriented??
The whole argument about it being better for the environment is disingenuous to me, because switching to less meat intensive diets, limiting sprawl, and switching to energy sources that have a higher energy density like nuclear power would free up tons of land for habitat preservation, and none of that would require population decline.
Thoughtful article.
Kids are expensive, not only in childcare, but in many other categories as well. Have cash subsidies in other countries not helped at all?
My other thought is that having an only child is not ideal. The lifetime value of siblings to each other can be tremendous. Is there any research on the life satisfaction of only children vs. other children?
“Oh look we gave a child subsidy of $12, I guess nothing works and we’re doomed.” I don’t get how this passes for analysis. Not blaming Noah - he’s just summarizing what little research is out there. The one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that when this crisis becomes more acute, societies will become *much* more creative in addressing it.
If we don't solve this, humanity is toast seems like a pretty big incentive. Over hundreds of years, a fertility rate of 1.0 means every generation is half the size of the preceding one.