91 Comments

I wouldn't worry too much about the twitter mob. They are extremely unrepresentative of the general population. That guy Mo Torres seems like a real piece of work - he's a PhD candidate and willfully misinterprets what you wrote so aggressively for clout? He's the type of illiberal "elite intellectual" that is dividing the left and (perhaps rightfully) used by the right to cast the left as crazy.

Thanks for your thoughtful and insightful articles. Keep doing what you do.

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Dishonesty from grad students and academics irks me more than most garden variety dishonesty and hypocrisy. It's like "I'm working my ass off over here trying to get a phd and somehow you have infinitely more status than me?"

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I've been fortunate to see in their entirety your free Substack posts the last two months and paywalled Bloomberg Opinion columns over the last year. I never once felt triggered or threatened by the various analyses over immigration and fertility. Forget the Twitter mob. Folks on social media who read last week’s allegedly scandalous paragraph really need to read the Great Replacement rebuttal piece, which is freely available to the world. The fertility rates are what they are. My Central American family and wife’s South American family two generations ago regularly had families sized five children and up. The later generations have mostly moved up economically and have no more than two to three children, if any at all. Eventually, the new generations discover that working, living a middle-class life, and having more children is hard. For what it's worth, I have noticed that when young couples around us start having babies, the trends reverberate within the social circles. Maybe there's a multiplier effect there worth exploring.

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Thanks, man. Really appreciate it.

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if anything, this should just be evidence that 'people insist on seeing anything which might possibly be interpreted as racist, as racist.'

I understand people on the American left insist on interpreting everything trump did through the lens on racism - but this leaves them unable to acknowledge the reality that he had the most multiracial coalition of any modern Republican. He did better than Romney among every ethnic group, _except_ for white voters. How does that possibly square with 'white replacement' theory?

This fact can't get through the to the twitter mob, because it blows their whole narrative up. In my time at Google, the only trump supporters i knew were people with H1B visas, who, like most of the world, are much more conservative than Americans.

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I think you're misreading the voter statistics in the same way as Bruenig's "most Trump voters are women and people of color" thing. As in, both of these are true because the population of the US has changed since Romney ran, but Trump still had an especially white coalition. (And most of his reach out to Latino voters in Florida, although it worked, was just straight up lying to them.)

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Do you have any sources to back this up? This FT article makes it look like you’re wrong here, and that Trump’s violation was less white than in 2016: he lost ground among white voters but made it up among minorities.

https://mobile.twitter.com/FinancialTimes/status/1324943713584390145

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I didn’t say anything about 2020 vs 2016. I just said his coalition was very white both times.

That did happen though; some of it was being the incumbent, unemployment being very low until March 2020, writing his name on checks, and lying to people in Florida about socialism.

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What we need to do... not from a government policy stand point... is educated people on timing.

I have two sisters-in-law who are on IVF (both career types... 40-years old). It’s heartbreaking watching them struggle.

Both were under the impression that egg freezing/ IVF was a sure thing. Apparently it’s only 50%.

I wonder how many children are unborn because of this.

I think generous child care, work flexibility, and other social programs could mitigate this... encourage women to have children early.

It’s part policy, but also part cultural.

Otherwise it will be the Mormons and Amish who inherit everything.

Anyways. Had 5-kids. Done my part.

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I not sure that unborn children due to delaying childbearing is a major issue.

"The latest SART report shows that 61,740 babies were born in the U.S. as a result of IVF in 2012. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports about 4 million births per year in the U.S., meaning 1 to 2 percent of all U.S. births annually are via IVF."

Going by the "only 50% success rate" claim, that means there would be around 60,000 births annually missing, which doesn't seem nearly enough to be significant for anything.

Of course, there might also be a group that delayed childbearing but never attempt IVF for whatever reasons. It's much harder to find decent numbers around the kind of thing. However,

"Recent research from the Pew Research Center shows that, as of 2016, 86% of U.S. women had given birth, one way or another, by their early 40s."

So as a kind of upper-limit it seems like we're talking about maybe 15% of women. If every single one of them never had children but wanted to them it would mean the "adjusted" fertility rate for the US would go from 1.7 to 2.1. That seems like a "best case" scenario, just using back-of-the-envelope math and we're still barely at replacement rate.

Also, Amish fertility rates have been falling just like everyone else's. See the article "How Long Until We're All Amish: Never Gonna Happen".

"In the modern period, we can see that, from the early 1980s to 2000, Amish fertility had actually fallen *way* more than U.S. TFR on the whole. Then it spiked in the late 2000s, and has fallen since."

https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-amish-268e3d0de87

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The other thing is 2nd babies. If babies were had at a younger age... there is more chance of a 2nd one.

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Honestly, I wouldn't mind if the Mormons and Amish inherited the Earth. Of course, they probably wouldn't remain as exceptional as they are now if they did. Apparently the Mormons (like ordinary Mormons, not the FLDS nutters) are worse out west than they are in Virginia - perhaps because they're the dominant culture out there.

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There is definitely a slice of liberal reformist Mormons in Salt Lake City itself, as well as the relatively liberal wards in the DC suburbs. (My parents were Mormons for a while in DC, but left the church, around the time I was born, after relocating to the Baltimore suburbs, where the culture was MUCH more conservative and conformist.)

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Noah, why are you sad that someone who has preconceived notions about meaning and doesn't take the time to understand what you meant offers a grandstanding condemnation? It's unfortunate if other people, who don't read you, are influenced by such people, but please don't try to shape your writing (e.g., write each paragraph so it can stand by itself) just to please what are sadly dishonest commenters.

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Loved your reflective approach and the dangers of nuance

On the topic - looking at India’s big “dividend” which is at risk because of poor human capital - and the US’ decline in education as well as China’s missing ability to extend education below the top 30% - seems that new models of learning and working are vital to deal with these demographics rather than focusing just on numbers

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It would help if my generation wasn’t fearing imminent death due to climate change/civil war/great replacement or whatever.

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I appreciate your clarification for those who may have misunderstood the intention of your words. I have a question about the original topic, though. Is it preferable for the country economically for population to increase through adult immigration (assuming immediate workforce involvement) or childbirth (delayed workforce involvement)?

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That's a good question! There are costs and benefits to each. Immigrants are much older than kids, so immigration doesn't do as much to slow down...BUT, some other country pays for the cost of educating the immigrants, so that's cheaper!

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It's not so much the cost of education. Kids fit the bell curve of talent; immigrants are shifted to the right. Immigration is not a random choice, but requires more gumption and openness than the norm.

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next post should be about choices people make while choosing sperm donors, race-based adoption fees and fertility by political orientation and you'll complete your own cancellation:)

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No matter what side you take, you'll be accused of favoring eugenics.

Want more babies? Eugenicist. Fewer babies? Eugenicist. Keep the number of babies the same? Oh you better believe you're a eugenicist.

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People shouldn't be forced to have kids they don't want, but one thing I've seen from reading surveys is that Americans are having even fewer children than they want.

There are a bunch of aspects of our society that make it way harder to raise children than it needs to be, and we should stop doing those things!

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I'd be skeptical of the effectiveness of "stop doing those things". Discussions, at least on the internet, around this often go something like:

"So we should have free health care for pregnant mothers, like Sweden?"

Yes!

"And we should have generous family allowances, like Sweden?"

Yes!

"And make it illegal to fire a woman for being pregnant or being a mother, like Sweden?

Yes!

"And we should give 480 days of parental leave at 80% of salary, with each spouse *required* to take 2 months off, like Sweden?"

Yes!

"And let parents with prams ride public transit for free, like Sweden? And have employers give paid time off for parents who need to stay home and tend sick kids, like Sweden? And expand government day care, like Sweden? And launch government campaigns encouraging men to take part in childcare and housework, like Sweden?"

Yes! Yes! Yes!

"And....Sweden has a TFR of 1.9. Now how sure are you that all that stuff was *really* the limiting factor? Or if we are saying that even Sweden isn't being generous enough, do we really think there's even a tiny chance of doing anything meaningful in the US?"

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I think you are getting lost in macro theory. Step back and remember that "the economy" does not have wants or desires and we don't care what is better for "the economy" we each care individually what is better for ourselves.

I study ancient and medieval economics and one very big difference is the populations. Technology has done more to increase population than it has done to increase living standards. Relative to us ancients had poor technology but vastly more natural resources per capita.

We should very much welcome voluntary population decline. The combination of population growth and increasing resource use per capita is a road to calamity.

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Can you clarify the significance of more resources per capita? I can look around my room and indeed just the very device I’m typing this on and see resources that were hopelessly inaccessible in antiquity - rare earth materials, electricity (coal & natural gas), dizzying array of plant and animal products etc.

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As I said the ancients had poor technology. By comparison most modern people have rich technology. But a very large portion still today have very little, and also little or no livestock or land. The better organized ancient cultures had plenty of land and livestock relative to their populations. In many areas ancient cities were clearly more affluent than the people living around them today.

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May 10, 2021
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There are no ancient cities in Zimbabwe. Try Babylon and Nineveh for starters. Common from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. Was common in Greece and Turkey until relatively recently.

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You might be surprised how long people lived in the civilized parts of the ancient world, and how miserably short people still live in large parts of the world today.

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They did live surprisingly long lives. Shorter than today, but surprisingly long.

Or rather, the half that survived childhood did.

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And still fairly common across North Africa, especially Libya.

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“Relative to us ancients had poor technology but vastly more natural resources per capita.”

Relative to us, the ancients died younger and lived harder, more painful, crueler lives. If you study ancient and medieval economics, it boggles my mind that you somehow missed that.

Perhaps the problem is that you only study the ancient and medieval world and never lived it. There are people around who have lived through famines or know relatives who have. Folks who boiled the carcasses of relatives dead from hunger so that they could survive. In the world you’re studying, that would have been a common occurrence.

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Famines yes and still happening, cannibalism no. Since WWII there have been big strides in life expectancy and a dramatic drop in deaths in war, but average life expectancy is still low 70s globally ie in the 60s in almost half the world. You're taking anecdotal stories about the ancient world and assuming they applied generally. On average surely lives were shorter and harder in ancient and medieval times, but the difference is minor compared to the massive explosion in global population.

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The point I made is absolutely valid: the by-far biggest difference that technology has made is to vastly increase the numbers of people on earth.

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"Technology has done more to increase population than it has done to increase living standards."

Risible. By any standard measure (I expect you'll make a new one up if I say *any*) living standards have greatly improved due to technology.

"Relative to us ancients had poor technology but vastly more natural resources per capita."

What qualifies as a "natural resource" is entirely dependent on technology. Coal, oil, bauxite, rare earths etc were all thought to be of little to no value until we figured out how to use them.

Not that "natural resources per capita" is meaningful - who cares about how much iron ore per capita is sitting in the ground? Try "natural resources used per capita" and you'll see it's risen greatly despite the growing population.

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Global population is up ~50 times since 500 BC. Are average US living standards 50 times better? Maybe you might judge so. Are average living standards 50 times better? That's a stretch. Is the mean living standard 50 times better? Absolutely not.

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I’m sure you’re aware the average and the mean are the same thing?

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Another way of putting all this is that if humans are going to avoid mass self-destruction, we have to be collectively smarter than the second law of thermodynamics. Till now we are not: as technology improves we use it mainly to increase our population and secondarily to increase our natural resource consumption per capita. We bear children children today into a world that is very rapidly running out of its capacity to sustain our behavior, and unless we get it together quickly will start decreasing our population and consumption involuntarily in ugly ways. The present outlook is very far from hopeful.

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Yes. I meant median, easy slip to make. It doesn't really make much difference in this case. And certainly not if you're insisting on "standard measures" of living standards. There's no way any quantified measure of living standard would give you anything close to a 50-times improvement of today's average or median over the ancient world.

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The global median household income is ~$10k/yr at PPP, i.e. taking expenditures and recalculating to what they would pay for equivalent stuff/services in the US. That's mostly basic food and shelter, not a lot of the wonders of technology.

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The reason we're having this debate is you haven't studied the ancient world.

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May 11, 2021
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Criminy is this math really so difficult? The current global average household income in PPP terms is about $10k. That means able to buy $10k worth of goods and services at US prices. You think in 500 BC the average household lived on the equivalent $200 dollar per year of goods and services? Do you think 500 BC was some extreme low point in the deep paleolithic when some global famine nearly wiped out the human species?

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Population decline means fewer working-age workers available to support the elderly. It's quite literally shrinking the pie.

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It might be shrinking the ratio of the labor force to the retired, but the retired are not such a big burden nor any obstacle to innovation or progress. Meanwhile we are facing a very serious threat from climate change, which is coming quicker and far more difficult to stop than most people realize, and the kind of growth one gets from bearing more children is hurting not helping.

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Eugenicism wants fewer minorities? The heck? The point ought to be countering the long term negative trend that the successful have fewer kids and the less successful tend to have more - in other words, if you're concerned about births by different races, you're an idiot. (Instead just be classist! Alright, that doesn't really sound much better does it)

Anyway, other eugenicists make a rather grave error in that they assume that lower quality births would be better off prevented. Almost certainly not! Even if there is a lesser positive contribution to the world from the average birth to a poor person compared to a richer person, *it's still positive*, and ought to be encouraged. Yes, in a vacuum we'd prefer every child to be born with astounding genes and be intelligent and well adjusted and not prone to obesity, but that doesn't mean we ought to do the great evil of using force to prevent people having children!

Further, I suspect any eugenic movement would have to not be coercive - it'd have to be cultural. A change in what is acceptable, such as encouraging people of lower capacity to use surrogate sperm, or perhaps everybody converting to Mormonism.

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May 10, 2021
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What you’ll be left with is that most of it won’t work, because correlation is not causation and most things we currently know about genetic traits are only correlations. You’ll need a way to prove gene editing is safe and effective, and that way can’t be editing human fetuses, or else nobody will let you do it.

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Why would it be my body my choice when it comes to murdering your child, but not when it comes to preventing sickle cell anemia? The notion that we should have any restrictions on gene editing for what is *your* child is preposterous.

Second, correlation not being causation is a maxim much abused here. We do, in fact, know that certain genes *cause* things - and to insist that we can’t know whether genes cause traits is to insist we can’t know anything. Surely, you should see the claim as self-evidently silly.

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> Why would it be my body my choice when it comes to murdering your child, but not when it comes to preventing sickle cell anemia?

What I mean is that a lot of people don't believe in my body my choice. More importantly, they don't believe in stem cell research!

> We do, in fact, know that certain genes *cause* things - and to insist that we can’t know whether genes cause traits is to insist we can’t know anything.

The problem is identifying successful gene edits. We only have the technology to know that SNPs are associated with traits, not necessarily that they cause them. If we start editing those to have the associated value, it will often turn out that nothing happens.

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> You’ll need a way to prove gene editing is safe and effective

Isn't selection of embryos for IVF based on genetic testing either already possible or very close to being so? This would presumably allow attempts to improve your children's genetics without the potential safety problems of gene editing.

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Yes, we already do it for things like Down's syndrome and I agree we'll be able to do more things like that (by which I mean, filtering out known harmful common mutations.) Though many people are already going to find that morally unacceptable, because it's kind of like an abortion.

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I'm pretty Malthusian in my thinking about population growth, within a country or more importantly globally. I don't see how arguing that more people on the planet is going to make things better, for future generations let alone for people living on the earth now.

The problem with Malthusian thinking is that it is easy to confuse or conflate it with eugenics and Darwinism interpreted in terms of race, nationality, or culture. Look at the grief Bernie Sanders experienced when he suggested promoting population restraint in Africa and other relatively poor parts of the globe where fertility is still way above the natural reproduction rate.

There are many ways to interpret the demographic transition but the consensus is that education - particularly for women - is a key variable causing reproduction rates per woman (the total fertility rate approximately equal to twice the gross reproduction rate) to fall near rates that generate population dynamics near levels in which the net reproduction rate (the gross reproduction rate adjusted for mortality risks is near unity. generating long run stable population stability.

The long-run problem with a low fertility/low mortality/high life expectancy regime is the resulting age structure: a relatively large percentage of people in the age group 65 years and older. Economic models like that developed by Kotlikoff (spelling ?) at Boston University suggests this is a good thing for accumulating capital. Moreover with automation the opportunity for older folks - like me ! - to participate in the labor market or at least contribute has improved as tasks are depending less and less on muscle as opposed to brains.

Carl Mosk

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" I don't see how arguing that more people on the planet is going to make things better, for future generations let alone for people living on the earth now."

A simple example is the brain of the device you used to write this post: it was made in a gigantic factory costing tens of billions of dollars, using the most precise, advanced technology known to humanity. The only reason you could afford it (assuming you aren't rich), is because they could make millions of them and amortize that vast upfront cost by having so many customers.

More people means more gifted people figuring out technology like that, and it means better economies of scale, improving the life of the average person.

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“ I don't see how arguing that more people on the planet is going to make things better, for future generations let alone for people living on the earth now.”

Because people aren’t rabbits. People have brains. More people means more human potential, more net increases in productivity, the betterment of the human condition, etc.

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I think "assimilation to US fertility norms" should have been rephrased; it suggests a) Hispanics are not of the US; b) the fertility norms are characteristics of the US, whereas you make clear above you understand they are contingent on particular historical developments and contingencies; c) "assimilation" has some connotations you might have done better to avoid.

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The idea that economic growth is dependent on an ever-growing population is a fallacy. Japan's population has been roughly stable for the past 30 years, while their GDP has increased by two-thirds.

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But their per capita growth has been lower than other rich countries. Aging isn't a death sentence but it is a burden.

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Not true.

Germany's population grew only 1% from 1998 to 2018, while real GDP per capita grew 32.1%.

US population grew 18.4% while real GDP per capita grew 31.1% during the same period.

Japan's slower GDP/capita growth of 18% during that period can hardly be blamed on its minor difference from Germany of -0.3% population growth.

Moreover, there's an implied denial of climate science in your analysis. In my opinion, unless you're ignorant or so fascinated by the idea of pushing mother nature's reset button that you don't mind if your grandchildren get burned up in a brush fire, you want population to stop growing.

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Check on the dependency ratio, how they have changed, and get back to me on Germany in 3 decades.

As for climate change, yes, that’s a concern, though the key insight is that humans aren’t rabbits. We have brains with enough power (and enough knowledge) that we can find creative new ways to make our environment habitable. More children now means more collective brainpower in the future to solve knotty problems like climate change.

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So you've got a speculative, completely unexplained hypothesis that a high dependency ratio stifles innovation and productivity growth, and you think the way to reduce energy consumption is to bear more geniuses. Swell.

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It's so speculative that we've seen it borne out through modern history.

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The climate science is nonsensical. Right now you have 6 billion people who would like to have the energy use of the US or Europe. We're going to have to figure out how to make increasing energy usage sustainable. If we fail it at that, population growth is immaterial because the existing population will doom us.

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Star Trekkie wishful thinking is the opiate of the do-nothings. As is solar, which increases emissions. We know what will work best: efficiency, reforestation. We're not doing enough of the former and it's outweighed by new kinds of waste (eg bitcoin), and we're still losing forest cover. Voluntary reduction of population growth is not realistically going to be any big factor but it's certainly to be welcomed.

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I'm fully supportive of efficiency and reforestation. But there's no way that is sufficient. Reduction of population may happen with the birthrate dropping in most of the world, but it won't be fast enough and will bring it's own calimtous consequences.

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And generally something that's very wrong in the pro-population-growth thinking is the idea that to maximize well-being we need to maximize hours worked per capita. Too much fiddling with macroeconomic models, not enough living and thinking about life.

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We have to do it on a sufficient scale. There's no free energy out there. There is nothing at all calamitous about dropping birth rates. Besides that we're wealthy enough to afford large numbers of retired people (and so is Japan), as people live longer many will choose to retire later. My dad retired at 65, got bored, went back to work while collecting his pension and SS and finally quit in his late 70s.

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Noah, I understand your sentiments, but how is the talk about fertility not going to impinge on choices other people make? I mean, at some point it will just become clear that a decision not to have kids is like driving a big SUV or eating meat - a decision with huge negative externalities. Aren't government going to tax that kind of behaviour?

From the incentives point of view: in the olden times people had tons of babies for purely economic reasons (having 10 kids to defend your estate, plow the fields, and care for you when you get old just makes economic sense, especially given the mortality rates back then); then the great industrialisation came (forget the pill) and having lots of babies is economically suicidal; so now to the get pendulum back into balance, the governments will have to make it economically suicidal NOT to have kids. Otherwise what is the alternative? Immigration is predicted on Africa growing forever.

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We should want to give people the ability to have as many kids as they want...not push them into it.

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And if they dont? Once falling fertility rates are present in the whole world (a very likely outcome), what do we do then? I honestly dont see how it then becomes any different from say a climate change or a pandemic?

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No one knows.

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According to Matt Yglesias (or rather according to the sources he cites), American women would like to be having about 1 more child on average. Most of the reasons they don't are things that could be fixed with policy changes (which are not coercive, just enabling).

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In the very long term we can probably do things like artificial wombs.

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Not sure how that helps, the problem is not pregnancy but the economic cost (above all opportunity costs) of long-term child care vs not having to care for children.

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What is the problem with pro-natalist policies? Or actually, changing anti-natalist policies, which is actually what we currently have? Our current economic policies/system really economically disincentivize people from having kids.

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I don't really agree with that, iirc, from polling, mothers are most happy with somewhere like 3.1 children.

I think our job is going to be removing the negative externality that's related to these actions, things like electric SUVs, lab/plant meat, and just getting our carbon cycle to neutral/negative will solve this issue.

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There won't be, anytime soon, a desrth of Africans who would benefit from immigrating to the First World. Counting on it is more realistic than counting on people magically deciding to have more children and more moral than using the state as a stick to hit people who don't want "a ton of babies".

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I think it is easy to overestimate just how many immigrants there actually would be. *Today* Spain needs to take in 100,000 immigrants a year just to stay even. Bulgaria 60,000. Hungary 50,000. Italy 150,000. Japan needs 1,000,000 a year. China is slated to need even more than that. They're projected to need something like 200,000,000-300,000,000 over the next few decades.

Sure, China isn't a developed country but I think the average income is still 10x what it is in much of Africa, so it would seem to be a desirable place to migrate and work.

Right now the US takes in 2,000,000 immigrants a year (the most) and Canada takes in 350,000 (the most per-capita). There are 250,000,000 migrants total in the world today. China's immigration needs alone would swallow *all* of them.

Meanwhile Africa is only seeing about 1,000,000 migrant workers per year internally (that is, moving from one African country to another for work). The number moving outside of Africa is much smaller.

Weighed against all of that is ongoing great convergence where migration becomes less and less appealing when weighed against the loneliness, alienation, and just general weirdness of living in a different culture thousands of miles from home. I live in Vietnam and have seen it happening here and Vietnam is still 1/20th the average income of the US. I personally know three people who turned down relocation offers to jobs in Australia, for instance. And I know even more who have moved to London, Singapore, or the US who hate it and post on Facebook warning their friends not to make the same mistake.

No doubt there are latent migration desires untapped in Africa if richer nations actually took an open borders-type policy but I'm just trying to put some numbers around it all to show how truly big the "places need immigration to make up for lower fertility" problem actually is on a global basis.

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