Reading this, I keep circling back to the massive opportunity cost that modern fertility imposes specifically on women. We rightly talk about the economics of aging, but less about how much productive potential and personal freedom is still tied up in pregnancy and childbirth. If we’re serious about wanting to sustain replacement-level birth rates without forcing women to give up ever more years of health, income, and autonomy, then artificial wombs feel almost inevitable — or at least worth far more investment and serious attention than they get now.
If the Industrial Revolution’s legacy was freeing humans from subsistence labor, maybe a comparable leap would be freeing women from the biological costs of reproduction. It’s not clear to me how else we expect to solve the math Noah lays out without resorting to draconian pronatal policies.
While there certainly are downsides to pregnancy and giving birth, and some women might prefer to have avoided it had it been possible, I am not sure that reducing such an essential part of the human life, of our social and emotional experience, to it's effects on production is the best way to think about child rearing, and life in general. We don't exist in service of the economy, we engage in productive activity to support life, of which pregnancy and birth and parenthood are for many the highest point.
The real burden of childbirth isn't the 9 months of pregnancy. It's the 18 years of constant care and 24/7 monitoring that the anxiety ridden obsessives who run our society demand that parents provide their children these days.
If we want pro natalist outcomes, we are going to have to massively rejigger society to make the cost of having children much lower and the social scrutiny around children lower.
How can we make having children cheaper than it is in Italy where the GDP per capita is less than 50% of the US but fertility is 1.1 and social scrutiny is low?
How can we make it cheaper than it is in Vietnam, where the GDP per capita is $5,000 and the fertility rate is 1.9 and social scrutiny is non-existent and they've had some of the strongest economic growth on the planet for the past few decades?
I assume by making the cost of raising children lower he meant through government subsidizing the high costs. Don't know what social scrutiny means, however!
There's a lot more pressure to hover around our children to make sure they're successful adults. Not all of that pressure is bad. Local kids with very little adult supervision at home have caused a crime spree in my city, and lax monitoring of online habits can have serious consequences, but the weirdly hyper-competitive atmosphere around child-rearing is not going to persuade more young people to have kids either. There's some pushback against those folks who think children walking to school or parks alone is child endangerment, but there's still a lot of emphasis on ensuring your kids have ten different after-school clubs and weekend programs, learning five different languages, and interning at a dozen different non-profits lest they end up flipping burgers at McDs.
If you look at Eastern Europe post ‘89 it seems that once people had the opportunity to spend on what were once perceived as luxury goods, on travel, on expenditures that signaled status, etc then the birth rate plummeted. It was more about status and self-actualization, IMO, and consumption provided more immediate gratification (and involved less work) than raising a family.
Italy, a place I am familiar with, was a similar story in my view. Personal branding and reputation/image has always been important there, long before social media, and as the potential for consumption (and income along with it) rose, traditional families became less of a priority. There was also atomization of what used to be close-knit family networks (people left small towns to find jobs) that made child rearing more challenging and many women preferred being able to work (and direct their own consumption) rather than scrimping and saving at home with kids.
The birthrate, though, had also plummeted in the Skandis, where they’ve tried to make it easy for women (and men) to work and raise families (though a great quote saw from a Swede is that in Sweden we pay each other via taxes to care for each others’ children).
And it can’t just be atomization of family networks and job mobility as the US was a very mobile society which relied less on those networks and yet still had a high birthrate (for a long while).
I think it comes down to culture and status and consumption (maybe selfishness). In the 90s when my wife and I began raising kids most of the higher status professionals I know had three kids or more. It was still sort of cool to be able to try to recreate the larger families most of us grew up with.
When I was growing up in the Seventies, it was understood that we were facing the opposite problem: overpopulation. The experts turned out to be totally wrong. I'm hoping they will be wrong again this time around, because I cannot see pressuring people -- meaning, inevitably, women -- into having babies not turning out dystopian as hell.
> When I was growing up in the Seventies, it was understood that we were facing the opposite problem: overpopulation. The experts turned out to be totally wrong
FWIW, the "experts" weren't wrong. Paul Ehrlich was a biologist. The book was initially ignored for many months until he started appearing on the Johnny Carson show. He appeared on the show 18 times and that is why you heard about it, not because the experts thought he was right.
Almost immediately after the publication his book the experts (i.e. demographers) said he was wrong. The 1968 annual meeting of US demographers featured an address from their president on how Ehrlich was wrong. In 1970 they had an entire panel at their annual meeting discussing how he was wrong. In 1971 the Census Bureau's director of demography said Ehrlich was wrong.
The experts were right and pop science fueled by the 1970s equivalent of Tiktok was wrong.
The population bomb was certainly overblown. Yet we cannot deny that there are limits to growth. The decrease in fertility might just be a natural response to the extreme growth in population, and increasing population densities. A baked in mechanism for long run species survival (meant to avoid overconsumption of the carrying capacity of our planet).
Everyone who tries to grow the population any further would then be like a kid cheering to blow more air into a balloon, because all they can think about is a bigger balloon, not considering that at some point it'll pop
The unsaid thing here is longevity research, specifically the prevention / reversal of aging through medicine. It neatly solves the population problem, but brings other social, political and economic issues. There's a lot more money going into longevity research and AI will only accelerate this.
I don't think this will happen - cultural evolution will kick into overdrive; this will be more obvious the lower the general rate of reproduction is and subgroups that have stable or increased fertility will become the future. I expect part of this will involve some degree of rejection of social media / phones etc. Might be a transition period but it will work itself out.
I think at least part of the connection between the online revolution and the decline in fertility may be online's role in the growth of entertainment. Life used to be boredom and fear but the boredom problem appears to have been largely solved. Sex used to be a way of dealing with boredom. But now we don't need it for that. We have other, less complicated and emotionally fraught activities to relieve the boredom. Having children was another way of passing the time and they didn't require a huge amount of resource to raise because they made their own entertainment (we really did, you know!). Now there's loads of ways to entertain kids and parents who don't invest their time and money in them are seen as remiss. Children seem like more of a burden now than they ever were – especially if you take into account the opportunity cost of all the exciting things you could be doing if you didn’t have them. Maybe we're amusing ourselves to a standstill.
Women's rights combined with the pill have allowed women to choose a life other than motherhood. There are more women in college and more women in medical schools. There may not be enough social media influencer jobs for the millions of Gen Zers who work towards this profession.
Unlike President Trump, I do not believe millions of men want to work in a repetitive factory job.
Currently, the type of factory job that might afford a man to keep his woman at home taking care of the kids is with the UAW. I believe their latest contract is around $65 an hour. If their factories are not on the coasts, housing is affordable. Here is the rub: the cost of cars is getting too expensive.
Perhaps a 25% tariff on foreign imports might help Detroit, I tend to think not, however. Pretty soon, America will look more like Cuba.... twenty-year-old cars held together with spit and bailing wire. Housing has become a larger percentage of monthly income, and repairs on the home are constant and very costly. That is, even if you can find a repairman. `
So, it turns out women do not want to be barefoot and pregnant. They want to work and have meaningful jobs. What is a patriarchy going to do about that?
Kinds no longer learn to imagine. Designed playtime, something with a screen, organized activities....My generation? We would search through the alley looking for materials to build a fort. Explore the oil fields, learning to entertain ourselves with simple things. I don’t see from my viewpoint that Gen’Z is going to do much of anything for the advancement of mankind.
That said, I am old man yelling ‘get off my lawn.” Our coutry’s leaders are crap. All of them.
Not only do I see women who aspire to something other than motherhood - or at least delay it enough to reduce their total fertility numbers - but I question whether young men aspire to be husbands and fathers. Look, 25 is a great age for having children, biologically - but do you look around and see a world where that's what people want to do at 25? Where the young people are getting that kind of plan in motion in their early 20s, to be settled down at 25? I think not.
For someone who is bullish on AI, won't this counteract a lot of the productivity losses from falling population? Even if the global population peaks sooner than all the forecasts, longevity gains suddenly go in reverse and in 30 years the global population is half what it is currently, we can't achieve at least 2x per capita productivity by then with 30 more years of AI development?
If AI is such a paradigm shifting technology, surely historical correlations between population growth and productivity do not provide an accurate forecast of future productivity?
Given how fast AI development has been and how slow moving these demographic developments are I really don't see why technological development can't grow productivity faster than population decline lessens productivity.
And yes I know all the incredible (but overhyped) AI developments of the past few years have barely budged productivity statistics, but short term measurements of productivity are always incredibly noisy and affected by so many other factors that I don't trust them to be a good guide to future productivity gains from AI at all.
Furthermore, you say "Unless AI manages to fully replace human scientists and engineers, a shrinking population means that our supply of new ideas will inevitably dwindle" ... but does AI really have to fully replace human scientists and engineers for this to be true? Surely there's a scenario in which AI does not fully replace scientists, but instead increases their productivity by 3x or 4x. Even if in the long run it only were to increase scientists' productivity by 2x that would be enough to more than offset the productivity effects of population decline for many decades to come.
Although AI hype now I view with generally juandiced eyes (as an investment professional) at the same time as the father of a soon-to-go-to-college w/in 3 yrs boy, I certainly look at the market and say, I am worried for him on graduation.
In my own firm we are actively holding back on hiring while we work in AI augmentation to staff. Service (financial) it is hard to measure real productivity, but I do see that AI augmented service sector work especially in office settings is really going to impact heavily labor demand.
I find it impossible to reconcile what I see already in my sector with the idea that more kids are needed to drive productive growth - there seems to be quite a disconnect or an over-abstraction.
And given the supply of humans thinking right now in 2025 is about 5x the supply of humans when Einstein & Bohr etc. set us on an exponential scientific paths... I have a hard time being terribly concerned that there is really a innovation constraint difference that is strangling if human population is chugging along in the 1-5 billion range. If we fell below a billion well maybe...
I further suspect AI augmentation to robotics is on its way to being quite physical-jobs destroying (or said alternatively, labor enhancing).
Further medical sciences advances in biological treatment (AI enablement here too) for life extension (or probably more likely in my sense extension of the healthy productive period of life even if I doubt within a foreseeable future maximum human lifespan is extended, but already a healthy person taking care of himself is by my memory in much better health at 50 or 60 than I recall 60 year olds when I was a kid - I think the statistics back this up [certainly it goes against Rose Tinted Glasses memory effect])
None of this to adopt a Techno-Utopian It's All Going to be Great view, do rather feel transition is going to be choppy with high risk of great unpleansantess (of types generated in the 19th c in industrial revolution)
As brilliant as he is, Noah is probably spending too much time interacting with gamers and internet junkies. He ignores the deep biological/evolutionary roots of much human thinking and behavior. Young children across the planet instinctively engage in play activities, inclusive of animals that talk (cartoons) and toy pretend worlds. Teens everywhere become interested in sports, music, entertainment (including horror films and fantasy), and just plain hanging out with friends. They follow changing fashions and dress largely to appear attractive to the opposite sex. A typical day: 1- breakfast, 2-school, 3-hanging with friends at lunch, 4- after school sports, clubs, or hanging with friends outside 5- dinner, 6-homework, 7- texting with girl/boy friends or checking out Facebook posts (replacing old school lengthy telephone calls), 8- watching videos on an iPad. Sounds pretty "normie" to me.
Computers have not replaced in-class high school teachers, as futurists predicted, and 19-year old college students are not using MOOCs to pursue a degree. College students enjoy the social environment of college, especially in residential 4-year institutions that offer tons of sports, concerts, and social activities. They major in fields where they would like to pursue a career that will give them enough economic independence to support a perhaps hidden at first but otherwise deep, affective interest in mating and child-rearing. Most people prioritizes family, both core and extended, just as generations did before us.
They marry late and have fewer kids for reasons that are more or less independent of any mode of social interaction. There is the legitimate interest of women in pursuing a valued career, and the decline of social-democratic governance that has created stiff economic challenges associated with childcare, eldercare, healthcare, housing, student loans, and the other socioeconomic obstacles making it burdensome to start a family. Yet the instincts are still there. Ask any childless single or married professional or working woman if they would like to eventually have child or two.
It is not that hard to maintain care for the elderly with an aging population, but it is hard to maintain that care while maintaining the same level of material production and consumption (especially combined with the decrease of easily accessible natural resources). Ergo, choices have to be made, and preferably smart ones (stuff like private jets and mega yachts are inefficient use of labor and resources, for example).
Wasn't economics supposed to be about trade-offs and scarcity? Arent we a liberal society? Then we should start with the number of people present and being born, and from there on one can investigate and decide on the appropriate policies for social provisioning, instead of maintaining that our absurd, planet-destroying levels of consumption (especially by the global elite and the upper middle class) must be maintained at all costs, even if it were by incentivizing the lower and middle class to either make more babies or die young.
There’s a word for governments planning for social provisioning and limiting what is produced and what is allowed to be consumed, and it isn’t “liberal society”, it’s communism — which historically has been a complete humanitarian disaster.
I guess I have trouble looking at world population statistics where the population has doubled since I was a child, where the population is at record highs, and where experts say the peak will be in 30 years - and seeing the burning problem. It seems a reasonable time to have lower fertility than in the past.
I admit that involves some handwaving about "in response to a lower population, I expect fertility to increase & stabilize the population" which has not been the case at a national level so far. But if the planet settled back down to something like 3 billion people, a 1950s level of population, I don't think that would be a problem.
For those who DO see a problem, the right investment might be in research to understand what is going on. We have lots of theories, but without really breaking things into steps and finding the weaknesses at each step, how do we find an answer?
> But if the planet settled back down to something like 3 billion people, a 1950s level of population, I don't think that would be a problem.
So you didn't read the links about how that will result in the end of Social Security, the rise of authoritarianism, city potholes don't get fixed, highways don't get repaired, and the further death of all small cities into just a few megalopolises?
As Simon said, a bunch of that is speculative fiction. Here's what I see:
- Even a worst case around social security and other retirement schemes looks something like "there was a sweet period where people got to spend a third of their adult lives not working, but now old people have to work too." I believe that is what is happening in Japan. Or as Noah says, maybe if this happens, then fertility increase - so the problem heals itself through incentives.
- This isn't a first world problem. We can grow the US population as fast as we want through immigration, for a very long time. So can other rich countries; people are begging to move in. And their living standards will go up too - it's a win-win!
- Note that I worry about climate disasters, and expect we will have to abandon places like Bangladesh soon enough. A lot of people will need to move, so the population in the habitable places can stay pretty unchanged. (Handwaving the math there, but you get the idea.)
- In a world where countries have to compete to keep and attract population, that seems to favor democracy and freedom more than authoritarianism.
- Yes a bunch of random little towns will die off. Already happening and I don't care; change is inevitable. Winners gonna win.
- Given above on immigration, no problems for the potholes & highways.
- Noah kinda glossed over whether AI (or fusion, or other advancements) will deliver radical productivity growth and material boons. In THAT future, don't we still get just as much bounty with a smaller population?
- I'm also confused how "as humanity shrinks in physical space, we will bind ourselves more tightly together in digital space." I mean we COULD, but also sounds like we might be living closer to each other and we could just decide to put the phones down and go to the park and meet people.
That is just one future scenario, and I have yet to find someone to convincingly predict the future.
The world we now live in is not the best of all possible worlds, with the most efficient allocation of resources. It is therefore also possible that a population reduction can be combined with a better allocation of resources by prioritizing needs instead of luxuries. There are places in the world with higher quality healthcare and social security than the US, with a much smaller GDP per capita, even at PPP, meaning they do less to reach better outcomes.
There’s a massive factor no one wants to talk about: women’s rights. While I greatly support them, every single action taken to give women more equality and freedom has the effect of decreasing fertility.
Maybe if healthcare was free and women were paid to care for their children and if childcare and preK were free. Oh yes and if the social safety net expanded throughout the human lifespan.
Don't we, in the main, have all that now? With all the local; state; and federal programs, raising kids is well supported, from what I see in my lower middle class area.
Low fertility is also a result of obesity and hormonal imbalances that GLP-1 drugs address. IVF is one way to get pregnant. Another is weight reduction. One billion people are obese, and another billion are borderline obese. All the “go for the burn” exercises and fad diets have disrupted hormones.
Reading this, I keep circling back to the massive opportunity cost that modern fertility imposes specifically on women. We rightly talk about the economics of aging, but less about how much productive potential and personal freedom is still tied up in pregnancy and childbirth. If we’re serious about wanting to sustain replacement-level birth rates without forcing women to give up ever more years of health, income, and autonomy, then artificial wombs feel almost inevitable — or at least worth far more investment and serious attention than they get now.
If the Industrial Revolution’s legacy was freeing humans from subsistence labor, maybe a comparable leap would be freeing women from the biological costs of reproduction. It’s not clear to me how else we expect to solve the math Noah lays out without resorting to draconian pronatal policies.
While there certainly are downsides to pregnancy and giving birth, and some women might prefer to have avoided it had it been possible, I am not sure that reducing such an essential part of the human life, of our social and emotional experience, to it's effects on production is the best way to think about child rearing, and life in general. We don't exist in service of the economy, we engage in productive activity to support life, of which pregnancy and birth and parenthood are for many the highest point.
The real burden of childbirth isn't the 9 months of pregnancy. It's the 18 years of constant care and 24/7 monitoring that the anxiety ridden obsessives who run our society demand that parents provide their children these days.
"... opportunity cost that modern fertility imposes specifically on women"
There's persuasive research that people with kids report greater life satisfaction; happiness; etc. than the childless.
Just as a transactional notion, children should have some sway in the marketplace.
If we want pro natalist outcomes, we are going to have to massively rejigger society to make the cost of having children much lower and the social scrutiny around children lower.
How?
How can we make having children cheaper than it is in Italy where the GDP per capita is less than 50% of the US but fertility is 1.1 and social scrutiny is low?
How can we make it cheaper than it is in Vietnam, where the GDP per capita is $5,000 and the fertility rate is 1.9 and social scrutiny is non-existent and they've had some of the strongest economic growth on the planet for the past few decades?
I assume by making the cost of raising children lower he meant through government subsidizing the high costs. Don't know what social scrutiny means, however!
What does “social scrutiny around children” mean?
Getting the cops called on you for letting your child play outside on their own.
Having children in public places. Upon having a child, an American adult is basically banished for 18 years from decent restaurants.
There's a lot more pressure to hover around our children to make sure they're successful adults. Not all of that pressure is bad. Local kids with very little adult supervision at home have caused a crime spree in my city, and lax monitoring of online habits can have serious consequences, but the weirdly hyper-competitive atmosphere around child-rearing is not going to persuade more young people to have kids either. There's some pushback against those folks who think children walking to school or parks alone is child endangerment, but there's still a lot of emphasis on ensuring your kids have ten different after-school clubs and weekend programs, learning five different languages, and interning at a dozen different non-profits lest they end up flipping burgers at McDs.
If you look at Eastern Europe post ‘89 it seems that once people had the opportunity to spend on what were once perceived as luxury goods, on travel, on expenditures that signaled status, etc then the birth rate plummeted. It was more about status and self-actualization, IMO, and consumption provided more immediate gratification (and involved less work) than raising a family.
Italy, a place I am familiar with, was a similar story in my view. Personal branding and reputation/image has always been important there, long before social media, and as the potential for consumption (and income along with it) rose, traditional families became less of a priority. There was also atomization of what used to be close-knit family networks (people left small towns to find jobs) that made child rearing more challenging and many women preferred being able to work (and direct their own consumption) rather than scrimping and saving at home with kids.
The birthrate, though, had also plummeted in the Skandis, where they’ve tried to make it easy for women (and men) to work and raise families (though a great quote saw from a Swede is that in Sweden we pay each other via taxes to care for each others’ children).
And it can’t just be atomization of family networks and job mobility as the US was a very mobile society which relied less on those networks and yet still had a high birthrate (for a long while).
I think it comes down to culture and status and consumption (maybe selfishness). In the 90s when my wife and I began raising kids most of the higher status professionals I know had three kids or more. It was still sort of cool to be able to try to recreate the larger families most of us grew up with.
When I was growing up in the Seventies, it was understood that we were facing the opposite problem: overpopulation. The experts turned out to be totally wrong. I'm hoping they will be wrong again this time around, because I cannot see pressuring people -- meaning, inevitably, women -- into having babies not turning out dystopian as hell.
> When I was growing up in the Seventies, it was understood that we were facing the opposite problem: overpopulation. The experts turned out to be totally wrong
FWIW, the "experts" weren't wrong. Paul Ehrlich was a biologist. The book was initially ignored for many months until he started appearing on the Johnny Carson show. He appeared on the show 18 times and that is why you heard about it, not because the experts thought he was right.
Almost immediately after the publication his book the experts (i.e. demographers) said he was wrong. The 1968 annual meeting of US demographers featured an address from their president on how Ehrlich was wrong. In 1970 they had an entire panel at their annual meeting discussing how he was wrong. In 1971 the Census Bureau's director of demography said Ehrlich was wrong.
The experts were right and pop science fueled by the 1970s equivalent of Tiktok was wrong.
The population bomb was certainly overblown. Yet we cannot deny that there are limits to growth. The decrease in fertility might just be a natural response to the extreme growth in population, and increasing population densities. A baked in mechanism for long run species survival (meant to avoid overconsumption of the carrying capacity of our planet).
Everyone who tries to grow the population any further would then be like a kid cheering to blow more air into a balloon, because all they can think about is a bigger balloon, not considering that at some point it'll pop
The unsaid thing here is longevity research, specifically the prevention / reversal of aging through medicine. It neatly solves the population problem, but brings other social, political and economic issues. There's a lot more money going into longevity research and AI will only accelerate this.
I don't think this will happen - cultural evolution will kick into overdrive; this will be more obvious the lower the general rate of reproduction is and subgroups that have stable or increased fertility will become the future. I expect part of this will involve some degree of rejection of social media / phones etc. Might be a transition period but it will work itself out.
I think at least part of the connection between the online revolution and the decline in fertility may be online's role in the growth of entertainment. Life used to be boredom and fear but the boredom problem appears to have been largely solved. Sex used to be a way of dealing with boredom. But now we don't need it for that. We have other, less complicated and emotionally fraught activities to relieve the boredom. Having children was another way of passing the time and they didn't require a huge amount of resource to raise because they made their own entertainment (we really did, you know!). Now there's loads of ways to entertain kids and parents who don't invest their time and money in them are seen as remiss. Children seem like more of a burden now than they ever were – especially if you take into account the opportunity cost of all the exciting things you could be doing if you didn’t have them. Maybe we're amusing ourselves to a standstill.
Women's rights combined with the pill have allowed women to choose a life other than motherhood. There are more women in college and more women in medical schools. There may not be enough social media influencer jobs for the millions of Gen Zers who work towards this profession.
Unlike President Trump, I do not believe millions of men want to work in a repetitive factory job.
Currently, the type of factory job that might afford a man to keep his woman at home taking care of the kids is with the UAW. I believe their latest contract is around $65 an hour. If their factories are not on the coasts, housing is affordable. Here is the rub: the cost of cars is getting too expensive.
Perhaps a 25% tariff on foreign imports might help Detroit, I tend to think not, however. Pretty soon, America will look more like Cuba.... twenty-year-old cars held together with spit and bailing wire. Housing has become a larger percentage of monthly income, and repairs on the home are constant and very costly. That is, even if you can find a repairman. `
So, it turns out women do not want to be barefoot and pregnant. They want to work and have meaningful jobs. What is a patriarchy going to do about that?
Kinds no longer learn to imagine. Designed playtime, something with a screen, organized activities....My generation? We would search through the alley looking for materials to build a fort. Explore the oil fields, learning to entertain ourselves with simple things. I don’t see from my viewpoint that Gen’Z is going to do much of anything for the advancement of mankind.
That said, I am old man yelling ‘get off my lawn.” Our coutry’s leaders are crap. All of them.
Not only do I see women who aspire to something other than motherhood - or at least delay it enough to reduce their total fertility numbers - but I question whether young men aspire to be husbands and fathers. Look, 25 is a great age for having children, biologically - but do you look around and see a world where that's what people want to do at 25? Where the young people are getting that kind of plan in motion in their early 20s, to be settled down at 25? I think not.
For someone who is bullish on AI, won't this counteract a lot of the productivity losses from falling population? Even if the global population peaks sooner than all the forecasts, longevity gains suddenly go in reverse and in 30 years the global population is half what it is currently, we can't achieve at least 2x per capita productivity by then with 30 more years of AI development?
If AI is such a paradigm shifting technology, surely historical correlations between population growth and productivity do not provide an accurate forecast of future productivity?
Given how fast AI development has been and how slow moving these demographic developments are I really don't see why technological development can't grow productivity faster than population decline lessens productivity.
And yes I know all the incredible (but overhyped) AI developments of the past few years have barely budged productivity statistics, but short term measurements of productivity are always incredibly noisy and affected by so many other factors that I don't trust them to be a good guide to future productivity gains from AI at all.
Furthermore, you say "Unless AI manages to fully replace human scientists and engineers, a shrinking population means that our supply of new ideas will inevitably dwindle" ... but does AI really have to fully replace human scientists and engineers for this to be true? Surely there's a scenario in which AI does not fully replace scientists, but instead increases their productivity by 3x or 4x. Even if in the long run it only were to increase scientists' productivity by 2x that would be enough to more than offset the productivity effects of population decline for many decades to come.
Quite.
Although AI hype now I view with generally juandiced eyes (as an investment professional) at the same time as the father of a soon-to-go-to-college w/in 3 yrs boy, I certainly look at the market and say, I am worried for him on graduation.
In my own firm we are actively holding back on hiring while we work in AI augmentation to staff. Service (financial) it is hard to measure real productivity, but I do see that AI augmented service sector work especially in office settings is really going to impact heavily labor demand.
I find it impossible to reconcile what I see already in my sector with the idea that more kids are needed to drive productive growth - there seems to be quite a disconnect or an over-abstraction.
And given the supply of humans thinking right now in 2025 is about 5x the supply of humans when Einstein & Bohr etc. set us on an exponential scientific paths... I have a hard time being terribly concerned that there is really a innovation constraint difference that is strangling if human population is chugging along in the 1-5 billion range. If we fell below a billion well maybe...
I further suspect AI augmentation to robotics is on its way to being quite physical-jobs destroying (or said alternatively, labor enhancing).
Further medical sciences advances in biological treatment (AI enablement here too) for life extension (or probably more likely in my sense extension of the healthy productive period of life even if I doubt within a foreseeable future maximum human lifespan is extended, but already a healthy person taking care of himself is by my memory in much better health at 50 or 60 than I recall 60 year olds when I was a kid - I think the statistics back this up [certainly it goes against Rose Tinted Glasses memory effect])
None of this to adopt a Techno-Utopian It's All Going to be Great view, do rather feel transition is going to be choppy with high risk of great unpleansantess (of types generated in the 19th c in industrial revolution)
As brilliant as he is, Noah is probably spending too much time interacting with gamers and internet junkies. He ignores the deep biological/evolutionary roots of much human thinking and behavior. Young children across the planet instinctively engage in play activities, inclusive of animals that talk (cartoons) and toy pretend worlds. Teens everywhere become interested in sports, music, entertainment (including horror films and fantasy), and just plain hanging out with friends. They follow changing fashions and dress largely to appear attractive to the opposite sex. A typical day: 1- breakfast, 2-school, 3-hanging with friends at lunch, 4- after school sports, clubs, or hanging with friends outside 5- dinner, 6-homework, 7- texting with girl/boy friends or checking out Facebook posts (replacing old school lengthy telephone calls), 8- watching videos on an iPad. Sounds pretty "normie" to me.
Computers have not replaced in-class high school teachers, as futurists predicted, and 19-year old college students are not using MOOCs to pursue a degree. College students enjoy the social environment of college, especially in residential 4-year institutions that offer tons of sports, concerts, and social activities. They major in fields where they would like to pursue a career that will give them enough economic independence to support a perhaps hidden at first but otherwise deep, affective interest in mating and child-rearing. Most people prioritizes family, both core and extended, just as generations did before us.
They marry late and have fewer kids for reasons that are more or less independent of any mode of social interaction. There is the legitimate interest of women in pursuing a valued career, and the decline of social-democratic governance that has created stiff economic challenges associated with childcare, eldercare, healthcare, housing, student loans, and the other socioeconomic obstacles making it burdensome to start a family. Yet the instincts are still there. Ask any childless single or married professional or working woman if they would like to eventually have child or two.
Why is 2 children per woman sexist? Women are the ones bearing the children!
And per woman is the only reliable way to count, since counting how many children each man fathers is impossible.
It is not that hard to maintain care for the elderly with an aging population, but it is hard to maintain that care while maintaining the same level of material production and consumption (especially combined with the decrease of easily accessible natural resources). Ergo, choices have to be made, and preferably smart ones (stuff like private jets and mega yachts are inefficient use of labor and resources, for example).
Wasn't economics supposed to be about trade-offs and scarcity? Arent we a liberal society? Then we should start with the number of people present and being born, and from there on one can investigate and decide on the appropriate policies for social provisioning, instead of maintaining that our absurd, planet-destroying levels of consumption (especially by the global elite and the upper middle class) must be maintained at all costs, even if it were by incentivizing the lower and middle class to either make more babies or die young.
There’s a word for governments planning for social provisioning and limiting what is produced and what is allowed to be consumed, and it isn’t “liberal society”, it’s communism — which historically has been a complete humanitarian disaster.
I guess I have trouble looking at world population statistics where the population has doubled since I was a child, where the population is at record highs, and where experts say the peak will be in 30 years - and seeing the burning problem. It seems a reasonable time to have lower fertility than in the past.
I admit that involves some handwaving about "in response to a lower population, I expect fertility to increase & stabilize the population" which has not been the case at a national level so far. But if the planet settled back down to something like 3 billion people, a 1950s level of population, I don't think that would be a problem.
For those who DO see a problem, the right investment might be in research to understand what is going on. We have lots of theories, but without really breaking things into steps and finding the weaknesses at each step, how do we find an answer?
> But if the planet settled back down to something like 3 billion people, a 1950s level of population, I don't think that would be a problem.
So you didn't read the links about how that will result in the end of Social Security, the rise of authoritarianism, city potholes don't get fixed, highways don't get repaired, and the further death of all small cities into just a few megalopolises?
None of that is a problem to you?
As Simon said, a bunch of that is speculative fiction. Here's what I see:
- Even a worst case around social security and other retirement schemes looks something like "there was a sweet period where people got to spend a third of their adult lives not working, but now old people have to work too." I believe that is what is happening in Japan. Or as Noah says, maybe if this happens, then fertility increase - so the problem heals itself through incentives.
- This isn't a first world problem. We can grow the US population as fast as we want through immigration, for a very long time. So can other rich countries; people are begging to move in. And their living standards will go up too - it's a win-win!
- Note that I worry about climate disasters, and expect we will have to abandon places like Bangladesh soon enough. A lot of people will need to move, so the population in the habitable places can stay pretty unchanged. (Handwaving the math there, but you get the idea.)
- In a world where countries have to compete to keep and attract population, that seems to favor democracy and freedom more than authoritarianism.
- Yes a bunch of random little towns will die off. Already happening and I don't care; change is inevitable. Winners gonna win.
- Given above on immigration, no problems for the potholes & highways.
- Noah kinda glossed over whether AI (or fusion, or other advancements) will deliver radical productivity growth and material boons. In THAT future, don't we still get just as much bounty with a smaller population?
- I'm also confused how "as humanity shrinks in physical space, we will bind ourselves more tightly together in digital space." I mean we COULD, but also sounds like we might be living closer to each other and we could just decide to put the phones down and go to the park and meet people.
That is just one future scenario, and I have yet to find someone to convincingly predict the future.
The world we now live in is not the best of all possible worlds, with the most efficient allocation of resources. It is therefore also possible that a population reduction can be combined with a better allocation of resources by prioritizing needs instead of luxuries. There are places in the world with higher quality healthcare and social security than the US, with a much smaller GDP per capita, even at PPP, meaning they do less to reach better outcomes.
There’s a massive factor no one wants to talk about: women’s rights. While I greatly support them, every single action taken to give women more equality and freedom has the effect of decreasing fertility.
Couldn’t we just ban abortion?
Maybe if healthcare was free and women were paid to care for their children and if childcare and preK were free. Oh yes and if the social safety net expanded throughout the human lifespan.
"free... paid... free... social safety net..."
Don't we, in the main, have all that now? With all the local; state; and federal programs, raising kids is well supported, from what I see in my lower middle class area.
The 'Rapture of the Nerds' was coined by Ken MacLeod in his Fall Revolution series
You've tied all those different strands together into an unnerving picture of the future.
Brilliant work.
Low fertility is also a result of obesity and hormonal imbalances that GLP-1 drugs address. IVF is one way to get pregnant. Another is weight reduction. One billion people are obese, and another billion are borderline obese. All the “go for the burn” exercises and fad diets have disrupted hormones.