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.
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.
And, nowadays, more than 18 years. You have to helicopter them (even if at a distance) through college, so 4 more years, then their first career years, so let’s say 2 more…you’re on the hook for 26 years! Then with the cost of childcare, you might be asked to quit your job and watch the grandkids. (Some grandparents voluntarily do that, others are already retired. But some feel they “have to” sacrifice.)
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.
And reducing the insane pressure to breastfeed would help too. Don't @me about how "breast is best." I'm just telling you that formula works fine and would reduce women's exhaustion and delayed re-entry into the workforce and into life generally. Making breastfeeding a deeply religious sacrament is irritating as fuck.
Fed is best! I know the whole breastfeeding movement started *because* back in the 50’s, women were told that breastfeeding was gross and only poor women or tribals out of National Geographic breastfed their kids. So I can understand why La Leche League, etc. sprang up to tell women “if you want to breastfeed, it’s perfectly fine.” But then the fanatics got hold of the idea and it became “if you don’t breastfeed you are a BAD MOM and your kid will be damaged for life!” Haha, generations were raised on homemade evaporated milk and Karo syrup mixes and no catastrophes seem to have happened. At least now we have the powdered Similac everywhere and easy to obtain, no need to jury-rig.
And the whole idea that breast fed babies have so much better outcomes is based on studies in countries where it’s hard to obtain clean water, and formula is expensive, so, “to make it last” it gets diluted. I doubt most people in the US or other wealthy or even middle-income countries have this problem. Baby formula is rigorously quality controlled, and if you use it full strength and mixed with sterile water you’re golden.
Read Brave New World. We have the technology today to implement it. The question really is, is this a utopian or dystopian vision of the future? I am not sure.
It seems pretty darn utopian to me! Imagine *knowing* your purpose in life, knowing you exist for a reason, knowing from childhood that there's a specific job that you were designed for and that you're guaranteed to love - never having to learn useless and/or boring subjects in school - and lifetime job security!!
Also, the orgies don't hurt.
Edited to add: all children would be raised by carefully trained, professional child-minders. No more crazy parents, or brutal ones, or alcoholics. No more dysfunctional families.
There are a number of good aspects to Brave New World, but the point of the story was that they came at the cost of something fundamental to our humanity. One of the sacrifices was meaningful art and literature - it's a world where all the movies are basically porn and people can't appreciate Shakespeare anymore, which certainly seems like a big loss to me. As the saying goes, it might be a nice place to visit but I suspect that I wouldn't want to live there.
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.
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.
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!
“Social scrutiny” is all the ways you feel judged for not doing the Right Thing as a parent - if your kid goes outside to play without an adult, or has too much screen time, or if they do too many after-school activities, or not enough, or if they’re noisy in public, or don’t get enough experience interacting in public, etc.
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.
There IS a lot of pressure to “cultivate” your kids so they can go to college (hopefully the right college) and get good jobs, because it’s not enough to graduate from high school and get a job with a living wage anymore. So parents are trying frantically to ensure their childrens’ futures. Which makes the whole job of being a parent both harder and more anxiety provoking.
The competitiveness also makes many people stop at 2 - the upper bound of what they feel they can deliver a highly curated and time consuming “concerted cultivation” childhood to. And it can’t compensate for childlessness.
If these demands are lowered then these parents may choose to have more. But honestly, I’m from 4 and I’m a bit unusual for my age. While I hope to create that for my own kids, most of the yuppies I consort with think I’m mad. So n>2 may be completely out of fashion even among couples who do want kids.
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
I’m personally don’t think population growth should be a goal but population stability certainly should be. There’s a lot of risk that will be incurred if there’s no effort to maintain that at least.
Thanks for this! Good to know. As a kid, I certainly couldn't have seen that bigger picture; I only picked up the panic indirectly. But my feeling about fertility policy having the very high potential to turn dystopian stands.
We have to make sure we don’t *pressure* people into having children, but instead *enable* people to have the number of children they want. Apparently surveys show that a large number of people end up having fewer children than they want and very few end up with more than they want.
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.
There’s also things like Kindle and Libby - not “online” in the Internet sense, but you can download and read books at home for cheap or free. Travel is cheaper, streaming services bring more movies on demand (no more having to be at home at 8 PM on Tuesday or you miss your episode), communication is free and instantaneous instead of - remember these? - long-distance calls that could be very pricy, etc. etc.
Online amusement plays a part, but accessing experiences in general (from library books to keeping up with friends) has gotten much cheaper and easier than in the past. So someone who is on the fence about kids might well decide that having a child is not worth the sacrifices.
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.
I do not know if you have read Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, but if you have not, you should. In her book “Mothers and Others,” she lays out the idea that we humans are “cooperative breeders.” In non-jargon: It takes a village. Throughout history, most kids have not had “intensive parenting” in nuclear families; grandmothers, aunts, second cousins once removed, your stepmother’s aunt by marriage, a whole network of kin who were often distantly related, would pitch in with the kids. This had the added benefit, for kids, of seeing people other than their parents in day to day interactions. If dad was dysfunctional, well, there was always Grandpa and Uncle John to provide examples of what a functioning man was like.
Today what we rely on are two (at best) stressed out and sleep deprived parents, grandparents IF the parents are lucky, nannies and professionals IF the parents can afford it, a Snoo baby robot IF the parents can afford it…you get the picture. Childrearing has become an intense grind that lasts far beyond 18 years for most people. It wasn’t meant to be this way.
Yes, I've read Hrdy. Like all who consider biology and evolution in their thinking, she presents us with a central dilemma. How do we reconcile our present circumstances with a biologically-based "nature" that was built during the Stone Age. That's why I look to "universal" programs when considering social policy. They put all of us in the same basket, rich and poor, old and young, etc. We at least stand a chance of developing policies that address our common nature rather than our membership in a local tribe. They also promote social solidarity.
Good example: Medicare and Social Security are universal and popular, and we don't mind the payroll tax, because we all feel the need to support our relatives. We all agree to pay taxes to support universal K-12 public education, the highway system, etc. Despite its flaws, the British public supports the NHS and the idea of universal health coverage.
The issue is that “eventually having kids,” too frequently turns into “never having kids.” My wife and I fell into that situation, as did most of our friends.
An addendum: I’m an only child so I’ve responsible for my parents alone; my wife has a brother, but he lives 2,000 miles away, so she’s responsible for her mother. None of our parents were at a point where they could help much with childcare, and we couldn’t afford one of us taking unpaid leave.
By the time our parents aren’t around, we won’t be able to have children; in fact we already can’t. Technically I suppose we could pay a surrogate - maybe large numbers of folks doing that could reverse some of this demographic trend, making surrogacy a potential career path for women, but involving another person in the process is terribly fraught.
Joe: Thanks for the comment. There are many more in similar circumstances today. Hopefully, our natural instincts will ultimately translate into effective political action that builds a social support system that works for working and middle-class families.
Yeah, I do think this problem will resolve itself eventually; unfortunately we are going to have live through the transition. It beats the alternative (not living to old age!)
Pitching here on that last sentence, that has not been true from my personal experience. My girlfriend is a working professional (logistics big time stuff) and does not want to have any children and hasn’t wanted to for years, neither does her female cousin who is even considering to undergoe the operation.
Also neither do I (male) and never will. Neither do my closest friends. To say that all women/men want children at this day and age cuz “instincts” but wont just
cuz “society makes it hard” isn’t sound either IMO.
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?
Kids 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.
That’s the thing that is so often left out of the “do women even want to be mothers” panic - do men even want to be fathers? Or at least the kind of father that modern wives want to co-parent with? Part of the whole trad-wife phenomenon is having the woman do the child raising, but, even if we’re talking a back to the 50’s lifestyle, fathers still have a responsibility to at least provide. And not spend it all on travel or games or whatever. If young men want to spend their money backpacking around the Himalayas or gaming or on collecting every Jar Jar Binks figure that has been made, well, good for them; if you’re single, or DINK (double income no kids) it’s “you do you” but having kids also comes with the expectation that you put them first.
And haven't we made the role of father harder than it used to be? I mean of course, because it used to be totally unfair! But it was still nice work if you could get it. The incentives have moved against the fathers.
I think part of the reason women delay motherhood until the 30s is because they want to have the same freedom that men have to mess around in their 20s before settling down.
It's biology but it IS fundamentally unfair that women need to have their shit sorted out by 30-35 while men can theoretically gallivant around because they're fertile even on their deathbeds.
The only way to increase the fertility rate is to use technology and policy to drastically lower the "self actualization time" cost of parenthood on women (artificial wombs, robot nannies, huge subsidies, pro family cultural change) or conversely, culturally lock down *men's* behavior so they're forced to sort their shit out by 30-35 too.
Our society has dramatically changed. It has only been 60-some years since the advent of the pill. We all laughed at Hillary Clinton’s line about “it takes a village,” but it was true. We no longer live in a village. We had institutions that helped raise kids when parents were not around. The church and its members, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts. If the local mechanic or butcher saw your kid screwing around, they would correct them. Neighbors were beneficial. There were norms of behavior that no longer exist. In my opinion, parenting has changed for the worse. My wife is a 6th-grade language arts teacher. Parents are more interested in being friends and having a good relationship than in parenting. A parent's job is to raise their children to be productive members of society, good citizens, and to get educated. Being a parent is giving children expectations to fill and enforcing norms of behavior.
Anyway, the real problem we face is child care. It has gotten far to expensive. We no longer live in the same town as our parents, and they don’t live with the kids anymore.
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)
Excellent points. I am worried about my recent-grad grandson. The market for entry level analytical types is extremely slow.
It does seem interesting that the two greatest concerns for humanity in the near term are somewhat complementary or offsetting in effects. AI threatens to replace all labor, while the fertility crisis threatens to eliminate most of our future needed labor.
I am being half facetious, but it would be something if in twenty years we said “good thing nobody had any kids, since there aren’t any jobs.”
Yes- while I rather suspect the end reality will be in-between (and more worrisome for lower-income markets than higher-income markets), AI and AI-enabled-robotics in industrial production rather make me more worried about lack of jobs than lack of people to fill them as such (notably in the transition state [years? decades?] as eventually economy and society will adapt - but eventually is my economist mind... the devil in details being in how much human time is packed into "eventually."
Honest to Bob, sometimes I think that might be what we (or rather those who come after me) will be saying. There will certainly be a market for trades and hands-on healthcare type work, but, bodies wear out, and a lot of tradespeople HAVE to retire early. Then what? If the age to draw full social security is raised even further, what do they do? Door dash? Beg? Get turned into soup?
I don’t see a full fledged dystopia, but I think we are going to be casting about for “what to do about people who have no real place in the new economy” in a humane way (as in, probably not what the current administration wants).
I suppose that it is not pure Science Fiction / Science Fantasy to have at least a modest expectation that physical trades will get more and more robitic enabled support.
The life extension, or at least healthy life extension, makes me wonder what we are going to *do* with healthy older people if they are barred from the job market due to age discrimination or whatever. If education requirements on the one hand and age discrimination on the other compress one’s working years from 25 to 50, instead of 18 to 65, there’s going to have to be a way to support these people and give them purpose. The age to draw full Social Security has already been raised; you can’t just bar people from the job market (even if “unspoken” and informal) and then expect them to…live off savings? DoorDash?
Fully automated luxury space communism (gay optional) sounds like a great idea, but where the funding come from, who knows. Certainly there will always be physical jobs available, but the body does rebel against doing manual labor or CNA work past a certain age. For obvious and humane reasons, the solution cannot be “Quietus.”
Indeed as healthy life extension continues, it is clearly for say non-physical labor jobs much much more possible to work well into ones 70s. My own personal reflection (also having seen how my father went into steep decline on retiring and becoming a coach potato).
As a political example, I was personally reluctant to entirely credit critiques of Biden in last two years about age feeling it was a degree of ageism going on. Then I saw that debate and I realised, "oh bugger, no that's the real deal."
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.
> 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.
This is a lot like someone in August looking at local temperature statistics, seeing that every week they’re having more 90+ degree days than they were a few months ago, where the temperature is at highs, and where experts say the peak will still be a week or two in the future, and having trouble seeing the problem that temperatures are going to be freezing in a few months.
With population, we can already see that fewer people are being born than a few decades ago, and this is true even though the current childbearing generation is in many places larger than the previous generation. If the new children have fertility rates like the current generation, then there will be a huge collapse in the number of children being born. We can look ahead and plan for the winter, even though we are still at the tail end of summer.
But you are riding a LOT on "If the new children have fertility rates like the current generation"... Look, in a deliberately ridiculous projection of that line, yes you can predict the human population will go to zero. But most people seriously do not think that will happen. I mean, do you think high fertility Catholics and Muslims and Ultra-Orthodox Jews just plan to stop having kids and die off?
Think about a sub-population analysis. Surely there are some cultures at or above replacement rate. Over time, those cultures will become a majority of the population as other cultures fail to reproduce. You might have feelings about that, but it is not a crisis for the species.
Anyhow, to me the right analogy is more like people saying "omg I am so full I have no desire to eat" and the response being "oh no, then you will starve and die." I will not starve and die; I will get hungry again in the future. This is not some chemically induced reduction in the fertility rate, just choices we are making one way that we can make differently in the future.
Chemical changes are easier to reverse than cultural changes!
And every subgroup seems to be having the same trend towards decreasing birth rates, even though some of them haven’t yet gotten as low as others.
I don’t think we need to think of it as a *crisis* - but we should think of it like the winter, or like bringing snacks when setting out for a long trip just after eating a big meal.
Or, as my mom always reminded me, “use the bathroom before you get in the car, as you never know when you’ll be able to use a rest stop.”
No, it’s not a crisis, but it’s worth looking at: “will the working age population as a percentage of the whole, start to dwindle? Will the age pyramid be top heavy with elderly who need care? Is this reversible by non-coercive means? If so, what?”
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.
The number of possible societal setups is not a binary between communism and liberal society, it's a large spectrum. There's basically an infinite number of different institutional (and infrastructural) combinations possible. (institutions in the widest sense of the word: cultures, laws, organizations, rules, ownership, hierarchies, etc.).
Forming a society together is, amongs other things, about the creation & evolution of institutions, of different ways for engaging with each other, that recognize the desire of people to advance their own interests (or their own morality, or their own desires), and that allow for human initiative and creativity, but that also promote pro-social behavior because cooperation and collective intelligence work so much better. That way we can have a certain level of welfare for the largest number of people, and maximize freedom; the capability of people to act in ways that they (can be reasonably expected to) desire, while minimizing the inevitable negative effects that any action is bound to have (on society & nature, which when accumulated might undo the gains we've made). But all of this is a difficult balancing act. We do this, amongst other ways, by minimizing power & control of a tiny few over the rest. And some designs simply work better for some functions than others might. This depends. Business corporations are great at creating widgets at low costs, for example, but the outcomes of government organized healthcare systems in most European countries are better (at lower costs, PPP) than the more market oriented approach of the USA.
In order to create and maintain a relatively free and prosperous society, such as the ones we have today (multiple, because there are large differences between the EU, the US and others), some ways of behaving have to be promoted (scientific research, learning how to read and write, actively engaging in democratic processes, engage in productive activity, pay taxes, and a lot more) whereas others have to be inhibited (don't do heroin, don't steal, no slavery, don't kill, don't make biochemical weapons, and so many others.).
Most institutions we have come from a societal response to some kind of challenge at a certain point in time, and the evolution thereof over time, whenever new challenges arose for which the then ongoing ways of operating were not good enough.
It is basically a contingent outcome we're in (although there might be some innate biological tendencies that contribute to how instutions have been shaped).
Some of these institutions are relatively inflexible, and more deeply embedded in our society whereas others change continously in response to challenges, technological change, ideology, or whatever. Corporate law changes all the time, for example, and the ways a limited liability corporation operates today is very different from a limited liability corporation 70 years ago. Before the 17th century they didn't even exist. But the concept of limited liability is not very 'natural' or 'normal' when you consider the natural instinct we seem to have to hold people liable for their behavior. We did, however, recognize that in some situations, limited liability is preferred because of the risks involved in some enterprises with potentially very large pay-offs for society as a whole.
Anyways, my point is that recognizing the challenges we are facing today (potentially destabilizing new technologies, changing demographics, environmental destruction, resource depletion, social unrest and instability deriving from inequality, ....) and finding intelligent ways to respond to these challenges, is not the kind of menacing prospect that you try to dismiss by calling it communism, it is what humans do and have always done. It is what our socio-political economy is all about.
This doesn't mean I want governments to plan everything. Supermarkets are amazing planners when it comes to the provisioning of food at low costs, especially in a competitive environment with high food quality standards. But I do want governments to limit anti-social behavior (e.g. enshittification of technology, concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra large companies and ultra-rich individuals, the legalized piracy and redistribution of local assets and productive capacity through hedge-fund led leveraged buy-outs, online gambling and more) and to limit wealth & power accumulation in the hands of a few, as well as the excesses of consumerism, and to promote pro-social behavior (through taxes and redistribution) so that we can live in shared prosperity and freedom.
This, to me, seems highly preferable over a society in which a small billionaire elite manages to capture the democratic process, and redesign institutional processes and get rid of all institutional safeguards and checks and balances, so they can formalize their power-grab, while enrichening themselves through crypto-commodities and blatant corruption, to just mention some other not-so hypothetical possibility.
"The god-mind of that collective delivers us riches undreamt of by our ancestors, but we enjoy that bounty in solitude as we wirehead into the hive mind for a bit of company." A mind that renders us less uniquely valuable and feeling less uniquely valued, that intermediates all relationships and commodifies each of us, is not a god-mind, but a demon-mind, and what we enjoy from engaging in it is not bounty by anything that deserves the name. We are already, some of us, as rich as our bodies can possibly need. We do not need to be more fed, entertained, or clothed than we already are. We need to taste true relationships, with true stakes, sacrifice, and non-fungibility.
This is such a big, multidimensional topic, I wanted to think about it a bit before contributing:
In the short run (next 30 years) supporting the Baby Boomers in retirement is not that big of a lift. You need about 1% of GDP to make up for the depletion of the SS Trust Fund bonds that is projected to start in about 2023. The last reform of SS happened in 1982, and since then wages have skewed to the top earners and corporate profits have increased from 18% of corporate income in 2000 to 28% in 2024. It only seems fair to tax the well-to-do and corporations to make up the shortfall. (https://cepr.net/publications/dont-buy-the-scare-about-security/)
In the medium term, immigration can expand the productive workforce, both through newcomers and then their children (which immigrants tend to have more of than native born families)
In the long run, nobody knows what things will look like in 40-50 years. Personally, I think low GDP growth (due to reduced growth in productivity and workforce size) is the least of our problems: Climate change and the bad effects of social media are way more concerning IMHO. Single-occupancy car/single family home -centric development patterns (unsustainable without constant growth) is also way up there on my list of problems for our society to solve. Building more nukes (much more expensive than solar/wind and what do we do about the waste and proliferation risk?) so that we can have Crypto (good only for facilitating criminal activities) and AI (so that we can have "friends" to talk to and even more persuasive ads to sell us more stuff we don't really need) seems crazy to me, although not as crazy as spending untold resources on moving a few of us (Elon's spawn most likely) to Mars to live in a sterile, completely artificial setting.
I have to say that it seems like massive productivity increases could mean ways of supporting shrinking/aging populations. If our food is being grown mainly by robots, our dwellings and other structures 3-d printed, manufacturing, transport, and a bug chunk of medical mostly automated, then why couldn't an ever shrinking number of human workers maintain a significantly larger population. Also in this view people could be partially employed for longer with less demanding work.
Capitalists economists can’t conceive of a world where you don’t invest capital for a return. One of the inevitable consequences of an economy where resource consumption and population decline means a fundamental rethinking of what money exchange and economics mean.
I anticipate a world where instead of exchanging physical goods we instead exchange things that only humans can produce for each other: live performances, camaraderie, sex. If human beings end up preferring robots for even these things we will eventually disappear as a species. This would be a good backdrop for a sci-fi novel. Does anyone have a suggestion? Sort of a Brave New World set in the modern near future based on these trends.
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.
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.
And, nowadays, more than 18 years. You have to helicopter them (even if at a distance) through college, so 4 more years, then their first career years, so let’s say 2 more…you’re on the hook for 26 years! Then with the cost of childcare, you might be asked to quit your job and watch the grandkids. (Some grandparents voluntarily do that, others are already retired. But some feel they “have to” sacrifice.)
Tl;dr the nest looks perpetually full these days
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.
"... 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.
And reducing the insane pressure to breastfeed would help too. Don't @me about how "breast is best." I'm just telling you that formula works fine and would reduce women's exhaustion and delayed re-entry into the workforce and into life generally. Making breastfeeding a deeply religious sacrament is irritating as fuck.
Fed is best! I know the whole breastfeeding movement started *because* back in the 50’s, women were told that breastfeeding was gross and only poor women or tribals out of National Geographic breastfed their kids. So I can understand why La Leche League, etc. sprang up to tell women “if you want to breastfeed, it’s perfectly fine.” But then the fanatics got hold of the idea and it became “if you don’t breastfeed you are a BAD MOM and your kid will be damaged for life!” Haha, generations were raised on homemade evaporated milk and Karo syrup mixes and no catastrophes seem to have happened. At least now we have the powdered Similac everywhere and easy to obtain, no need to jury-rig.
And the whole idea that breast fed babies have so much better outcomes is based on studies in countries where it’s hard to obtain clean water, and formula is expensive, so, “to make it last” it gets diluted. I doubt most people in the US or other wealthy or even middle-income countries have this problem. Baby formula is rigorously quality controlled, and if you use it full strength and mixed with sterile water you’re golden.
THANK YOU
Read Brave New World. We have the technology today to implement it. The question really is, is this a utopian or dystopian vision of the future? I am not sure.
It seems pretty darn utopian to me! Imagine *knowing* your purpose in life, knowing you exist for a reason, knowing from childhood that there's a specific job that you were designed for and that you're guaranteed to love - never having to learn useless and/or boring subjects in school - and lifetime job security!!
Also, the orgies don't hurt.
Edited to add: all children would be raised by carefully trained, professional child-minders. No more crazy parents, or brutal ones, or alcoholics. No more dysfunctional families.
There are a number of good aspects to Brave New World, but the point of the story was that they came at the cost of something fundamental to our humanity. One of the sacrifices was meaningful art and literature - it's a world where all the movies are basically porn and people can't appreciate Shakespeare anymore, which certainly seems like a big loss to me. As the saying goes, it might be a nice place to visit but I suspect that I wouldn't want to live there.
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.
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.
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!
“Social scrutiny” is all the ways you feel judged for not doing the Right Thing as a parent - if your kid goes outside to play without an adult, or has too much screen time, or if they do too many after-school activities, or not enough, or if they’re noisy in public, or don’t get enough experience interacting in public, etc.
“Kid rotting” is apparently one term de jour https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/80s-summer-kids-1.7570235
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.
There IS a lot of pressure to “cultivate” your kids so they can go to college (hopefully the right college) and get good jobs, because it’s not enough to graduate from high school and get a job with a living wage anymore. So parents are trying frantically to ensure their childrens’ futures. Which makes the whole job of being a parent both harder and more anxiety provoking.
This is an upper middle class problem.
The competitiveness also makes many people stop at 2 - the upper bound of what they feel they can deliver a highly curated and time consuming “concerted cultivation” childhood to. And it can’t compensate for childlessness.
If these demands are lowered then these parents may choose to have more. But honestly, I’m from 4 and I’m a bit unusual for my age. While I hope to create that for my own kids, most of the yuppies I consort with think I’m mad. So n>2 may be completely out of fashion even among couples who do want kids.
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
I’m personally don’t think population growth should be a goal but population stability certainly should be. There’s a lot of risk that will be incurred if there’s no effort to maintain that at least.
Thanks for this! Good to know. As a kid, I certainly couldn't have seen that bigger picture; I only picked up the panic indirectly. But my feeling about fertility policy having the very high potential to turn dystopian stands.
We have to make sure we don’t *pressure* people into having children, but instead *enable* people to have the number of children they want. Apparently surveys show that a large number of people end up having fewer children than they want and very few end up with more than they want.
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.
The Amish and the Orthodox Jews inherit the earth?
Honestly it'll probably be something weirder. Who knows
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.
There’s also things like Kindle and Libby - not “online” in the Internet sense, but you can download and read books at home for cheap or free. Travel is cheaper, streaming services bring more movies on demand (no more having to be at home at 8 PM on Tuesday or you miss your episode), communication is free and instantaneous instead of - remember these? - long-distance calls that could be very pricy, etc. etc.
Online amusement plays a part, but accessing experiences in general (from library books to keeping up with friends) has gotten much cheaper and easier than in the past. So someone who is on the fence about kids might well decide that having a child is not worth the sacrifices.
> Sex used to be a way of dealing with boredom.
I think people are doing it wrong…
:-) and now they know they're doing it wrong because they've spent too much time watching sex's athletic elite on PornHub.
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.
I do not know if you have read Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, but if you have not, you should. In her book “Mothers and Others,” she lays out the idea that we humans are “cooperative breeders.” In non-jargon: It takes a village. Throughout history, most kids have not had “intensive parenting” in nuclear families; grandmothers, aunts, second cousins once removed, your stepmother’s aunt by marriage, a whole network of kin who were often distantly related, would pitch in with the kids. This had the added benefit, for kids, of seeing people other than their parents in day to day interactions. If dad was dysfunctional, well, there was always Grandpa and Uncle John to provide examples of what a functioning man was like.
Today what we rely on are two (at best) stressed out and sleep deprived parents, grandparents IF the parents are lucky, nannies and professionals IF the parents can afford it, a Snoo baby robot IF the parents can afford it…you get the picture. Childrearing has become an intense grind that lasts far beyond 18 years for most people. It wasn’t meant to be this way.
Yes, I've read Hrdy. Like all who consider biology and evolution in their thinking, she presents us with a central dilemma. How do we reconcile our present circumstances with a biologically-based "nature" that was built during the Stone Age. That's why I look to "universal" programs when considering social policy. They put all of us in the same basket, rich and poor, old and young, etc. We at least stand a chance of developing policies that address our common nature rather than our membership in a local tribe. They also promote social solidarity.
Good example: Medicare and Social Security are universal and popular, and we don't mind the payroll tax, because we all feel the need to support our relatives. We all agree to pay taxes to support universal K-12 public education, the highway system, etc. Despite its flaws, the British public supports the NHS and the idea of universal health coverage.
The issue is that “eventually having kids,” too frequently turns into “never having kids.” My wife and I fell into that situation, as did most of our friends.
An addendum: I’m an only child so I’ve responsible for my parents alone; my wife has a brother, but he lives 2,000 miles away, so she’s responsible for her mother. None of our parents were at a point where they could help much with childcare, and we couldn’t afford one of us taking unpaid leave.
By the time our parents aren’t around, we won’t be able to have children; in fact we already can’t. Technically I suppose we could pay a surrogate - maybe large numbers of folks doing that could reverse some of this demographic trend, making surrogacy a potential career path for women, but involving another person in the process is terribly fraught.
Joe: Thanks for the comment. There are many more in similar circumstances today. Hopefully, our natural instincts will ultimately translate into effective political action that builds a social support system that works for working and middle-class families.
Yeah, I do think this problem will resolve itself eventually; unfortunately we are going to have live through the transition. It beats the alternative (not living to old age!)
Pitching here on that last sentence, that has not been true from my personal experience. My girlfriend is a working professional (logistics big time stuff) and does not want to have any children and hasn’t wanted to for years, neither does her female cousin who is even considering to undergoe the operation.
Also neither do I (male) and never will. Neither do my closest friends. To say that all women/men want children at this day and age cuz “instincts” but wont just
cuz “society makes it hard” isn’t sound either IMO.
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?
Kids 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.
That’s the thing that is so often left out of the “do women even want to be mothers” panic - do men even want to be fathers? Or at least the kind of father that modern wives want to co-parent with? Part of the whole trad-wife phenomenon is having the woman do the child raising, but, even if we’re talking a back to the 50’s lifestyle, fathers still have a responsibility to at least provide. And not spend it all on travel or games or whatever. If young men want to spend their money backpacking around the Himalayas or gaming or on collecting every Jar Jar Binks figure that has been made, well, good for them; if you’re single, or DINK (double income no kids) it’s “you do you” but having kids also comes with the expectation that you put them first.
And haven't we made the role of father harder than it used to be? I mean of course, because it used to be totally unfair! But it was still nice work if you could get it. The incentives have moved against the fathers.
Kids these days are still building stuff, they're just doing it in Minecraft and Roblox.
I think part of the reason women delay motherhood until the 30s is because they want to have the same freedom that men have to mess around in their 20s before settling down.
It's biology but it IS fundamentally unfair that women need to have their shit sorted out by 30-35 while men can theoretically gallivant around because they're fertile even on their deathbeds.
The only way to increase the fertility rate is to use technology and policy to drastically lower the "self actualization time" cost of parenthood on women (artificial wombs, robot nannies, huge subsidies, pro family cultural change) or conversely, culturally lock down *men's* behavior so they're forced to sort their shit out by 30-35 too.
Our society has dramatically changed. It has only been 60-some years since the advent of the pill. We all laughed at Hillary Clinton’s line about “it takes a village,” but it was true. We no longer live in a village. We had institutions that helped raise kids when parents were not around. The church and its members, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts. If the local mechanic or butcher saw your kid screwing around, they would correct them. Neighbors were beneficial. There were norms of behavior that no longer exist. In my opinion, parenting has changed for the worse. My wife is a 6th-grade language arts teacher. Parents are more interested in being friends and having a good relationship than in parenting. A parent's job is to raise their children to be productive members of society, good citizens, and to get educated. Being a parent is giving children expectations to fill and enforcing norms of behavior.
Anyway, the real problem we face is child care. It has gotten far to expensive. We no longer live in the same town as our parents, and they don’t live with the kids anymore.
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)
Excellent points. I am worried about my recent-grad grandson. The market for entry level analytical types is extremely slow.
It does seem interesting that the two greatest concerns for humanity in the near term are somewhat complementary or offsetting in effects. AI threatens to replace all labor, while the fertility crisis threatens to eliminate most of our future needed labor.
I am being half facetious, but it would be something if in twenty years we said “good thing nobody had any kids, since there aren’t any jobs.”
Yes- while I rather suspect the end reality will be in-between (and more worrisome for lower-income markets than higher-income markets), AI and AI-enabled-robotics in industrial production rather make me more worried about lack of jobs than lack of people to fill them as such (notably in the transition state [years? decades?] as eventually economy and society will adapt - but eventually is my economist mind... the devil in details being in how much human time is packed into "eventually."
Honest to Bob, sometimes I think that might be what we (or rather those who come after me) will be saying. There will certainly be a market for trades and hands-on healthcare type work, but, bodies wear out, and a lot of tradespeople HAVE to retire early. Then what? If the age to draw full social security is raised even further, what do they do? Door dash? Beg? Get turned into soup?
I don’t see a full fledged dystopia, but I think we are going to be casting about for “what to do about people who have no real place in the new economy” in a humane way (as in, probably not what the current administration wants).
I suppose that it is not pure Science Fiction / Science Fantasy to have at least a modest expectation that physical trades will get more and more robitic enabled support.
The life extension, or at least healthy life extension, makes me wonder what we are going to *do* with healthy older people if they are barred from the job market due to age discrimination or whatever. If education requirements on the one hand and age discrimination on the other compress one’s working years from 25 to 50, instead of 18 to 65, there’s going to have to be a way to support these people and give them purpose. The age to draw full Social Security has already been raised; you can’t just bar people from the job market (even if “unspoken” and informal) and then expect them to…live off savings? DoorDash?
Fully automated luxury space communism (gay optional) sounds like a great idea, but where the funding come from, who knows. Certainly there will always be physical jobs available, but the body does rebel against doing manual labor or CNA work past a certain age. For obvious and humane reasons, the solution cannot be “Quietus.”
Indeed as healthy life extension continues, it is clearly for say non-physical labor jobs much much more possible to work well into ones 70s. My own personal reflection (also having seen how my father went into steep decline on retiring and becoming a coach potato).
As a political example, I was personally reluctant to entirely credit critiques of Biden in last two years about age feeling it was a degree of ageism going on. Then I saw that debate and I realised, "oh bugger, no that's the real deal."
(as a self-warning to over-correction)
Same regarding Joe Biden. I rolled my eyes at all the ageism (because it’s not as if Donald Trump was or is a spring chicken) but the debate, oof.
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.
> 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.
This is a lot like someone in August looking at local temperature statistics, seeing that every week they’re having more 90+ degree days than they were a few months ago, where the temperature is at highs, and where experts say the peak will still be a week or two in the future, and having trouble seeing the problem that temperatures are going to be freezing in a few months.
With population, we can already see that fewer people are being born than a few decades ago, and this is true even though the current childbearing generation is in many places larger than the previous generation. If the new children have fertility rates like the current generation, then there will be a huge collapse in the number of children being born. We can look ahead and plan for the winter, even though we are still at the tail end of summer.
But you are riding a LOT on "If the new children have fertility rates like the current generation"... Look, in a deliberately ridiculous projection of that line, yes you can predict the human population will go to zero. But most people seriously do not think that will happen. I mean, do you think high fertility Catholics and Muslims and Ultra-Orthodox Jews just plan to stop having kids and die off?
Think about a sub-population analysis. Surely there are some cultures at or above replacement rate. Over time, those cultures will become a majority of the population as other cultures fail to reproduce. You might have feelings about that, but it is not a crisis for the species.
Anyhow, to me the right analogy is more like people saying "omg I am so full I have no desire to eat" and the response being "oh no, then you will starve and die." I will not starve and die; I will get hungry again in the future. This is not some chemically induced reduction in the fertility rate, just choices we are making one way that we can make differently in the future.
Chemical changes are easier to reverse than cultural changes!
And every subgroup seems to be having the same trend towards decreasing birth rates, even though some of them haven’t yet gotten as low as others.
I don’t think we need to think of it as a *crisis* - but we should think of it like the winter, or like bringing snacks when setting out for a long trip just after eating a big meal.
Or, as my mom always reminded me, “use the bathroom before you get in the car, as you never know when you’ll be able to use a rest stop.”
No, it’s not a crisis, but it’s worth looking at: “will the working age population as a percentage of the whole, start to dwindle? Will the age pyramid be top heavy with elderly who need care? Is this reversible by non-coercive means? If so, what?”
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.
The number of possible societal setups is not a binary between communism and liberal society, it's a large spectrum. There's basically an infinite number of different institutional (and infrastructural) combinations possible. (institutions in the widest sense of the word: cultures, laws, organizations, rules, ownership, hierarchies, etc.).
Forming a society together is, amongs other things, about the creation & evolution of institutions, of different ways for engaging with each other, that recognize the desire of people to advance their own interests (or their own morality, or their own desires), and that allow for human initiative and creativity, but that also promote pro-social behavior because cooperation and collective intelligence work so much better. That way we can have a certain level of welfare for the largest number of people, and maximize freedom; the capability of people to act in ways that they (can be reasonably expected to) desire, while minimizing the inevitable negative effects that any action is bound to have (on society & nature, which when accumulated might undo the gains we've made). But all of this is a difficult balancing act. We do this, amongst other ways, by minimizing power & control of a tiny few over the rest. And some designs simply work better for some functions than others might. This depends. Business corporations are great at creating widgets at low costs, for example, but the outcomes of government organized healthcare systems in most European countries are better (at lower costs, PPP) than the more market oriented approach of the USA.
In order to create and maintain a relatively free and prosperous society, such as the ones we have today (multiple, because there are large differences between the EU, the US and others), some ways of behaving have to be promoted (scientific research, learning how to read and write, actively engaging in democratic processes, engage in productive activity, pay taxes, and a lot more) whereas others have to be inhibited (don't do heroin, don't steal, no slavery, don't kill, don't make biochemical weapons, and so many others.).
Most institutions we have come from a societal response to some kind of challenge at a certain point in time, and the evolution thereof over time, whenever new challenges arose for which the then ongoing ways of operating were not good enough.
It is basically a contingent outcome we're in (although there might be some innate biological tendencies that contribute to how instutions have been shaped).
Some of these institutions are relatively inflexible, and more deeply embedded in our society whereas others change continously in response to challenges, technological change, ideology, or whatever. Corporate law changes all the time, for example, and the ways a limited liability corporation operates today is very different from a limited liability corporation 70 years ago. Before the 17th century they didn't even exist. But the concept of limited liability is not very 'natural' or 'normal' when you consider the natural instinct we seem to have to hold people liable for their behavior. We did, however, recognize that in some situations, limited liability is preferred because of the risks involved in some enterprises with potentially very large pay-offs for society as a whole.
Anyways, my point is that recognizing the challenges we are facing today (potentially destabilizing new technologies, changing demographics, environmental destruction, resource depletion, social unrest and instability deriving from inequality, ....) and finding intelligent ways to respond to these challenges, is not the kind of menacing prospect that you try to dismiss by calling it communism, it is what humans do and have always done. It is what our socio-political economy is all about.
This doesn't mean I want governments to plan everything. Supermarkets are amazing planners when it comes to the provisioning of food at low costs, especially in a competitive environment with high food quality standards. But I do want governments to limit anti-social behavior (e.g. enshittification of technology, concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra large companies and ultra-rich individuals, the legalized piracy and redistribution of local assets and productive capacity through hedge-fund led leveraged buy-outs, online gambling and more) and to limit wealth & power accumulation in the hands of a few, as well as the excesses of consumerism, and to promote pro-social behavior (through taxes and redistribution) so that we can live in shared prosperity and freedom.
This, to me, seems highly preferable over a society in which a small billionaire elite manages to capture the democratic process, and redesign institutional processes and get rid of all institutional safeguards and checks and balances, so they can formalize their power-grab, while enrichening themselves through crypto-commodities and blatant corruption, to just mention some other not-so hypothetical possibility.
"The god-mind of that collective delivers us riches undreamt of by our ancestors, but we enjoy that bounty in solitude as we wirehead into the hive mind for a bit of company." A mind that renders us less uniquely valuable and feeling less uniquely valued, that intermediates all relationships and commodifies each of us, is not a god-mind, but a demon-mind, and what we enjoy from engaging in it is not bounty by anything that deserves the name. We are already, some of us, as rich as our bodies can possibly need. We do not need to be more fed, entertained, or clothed than we already are. We need to taste true relationships, with true stakes, sacrifice, and non-fungibility.
This is such a big, multidimensional topic, I wanted to think about it a bit before contributing:
In the short run (next 30 years) supporting the Baby Boomers in retirement is not that big of a lift. You need about 1% of GDP to make up for the depletion of the SS Trust Fund bonds that is projected to start in about 2023. The last reform of SS happened in 1982, and since then wages have skewed to the top earners and corporate profits have increased from 18% of corporate income in 2000 to 28% in 2024. It only seems fair to tax the well-to-do and corporations to make up the shortfall. (https://cepr.net/publications/dont-buy-the-scare-about-security/)
In the medium term, immigration can expand the productive workforce, both through newcomers and then their children (which immigrants tend to have more of than native born families)
In the long run, nobody knows what things will look like in 40-50 years. Personally, I think low GDP growth (due to reduced growth in productivity and workforce size) is the least of our problems: Climate change and the bad effects of social media are way more concerning IMHO. Single-occupancy car/single family home -centric development patterns (unsustainable without constant growth) is also way up there on my list of problems for our society to solve. Building more nukes (much more expensive than solar/wind and what do we do about the waste and proliferation risk?) so that we can have Crypto (good only for facilitating criminal activities) and AI (so that we can have "friends" to talk to and even more persuasive ads to sell us more stuff we don't really need) seems crazy to me, although not as crazy as spending untold resources on moving a few of us (Elon's spawn most likely) to Mars to live in a sterile, completely artificial setting.
My vision of the future is one where we live in compact cities (not too different than Western Europe or Japan currently) where we can walk/bike/transit to routine daily destinations, with cars to take us to rural destinations on weekends and vacations; a future where we generate most (if not all) our energy from green sources (https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-scale-solar-pv); a future where social media is tamed so kids have normal childhoods developing social skills ( https://www.afterbabel.com/p/welcome-to-the-after-babel-substack) and where it is subject to the same liability for publishing false content as other media (https://cepr.net/publications/no-more-special-privileges-for-social-media-giants-reform-section-230/) ; and a future where we have enough leisure time to meet people in person, have lots of sex and have lots more kids and appreciate the incredible natural world we are so lucky to live in.
I have to say that it seems like massive productivity increases could mean ways of supporting shrinking/aging populations. If our food is being grown mainly by robots, our dwellings and other structures 3-d printed, manufacturing, transport, and a bug chunk of medical mostly automated, then why couldn't an ever shrinking number of human workers maintain a significantly larger population. Also in this view people could be partially employed for longer with less demanding work.
Capitalists economists can’t conceive of a world where you don’t invest capital for a return. One of the inevitable consequences of an economy where resource consumption and population decline means a fundamental rethinking of what money exchange and economics mean.
I anticipate a world where instead of exchanging physical goods we instead exchange things that only humans can produce for each other: live performances, camaraderie, sex. If human beings end up preferring robots for even these things we will eventually disappear as a species. This would be a good backdrop for a sci-fi novel. Does anyone have a suggestion? Sort of a Brave New World set in the modern near future based on these trends.
"After Life" by Simon Funk is exactly this story.