Are We Doomed?(lrb.co.uk) |
Are We Doomed?(lrb.co.uk) |
Traditional investments like real estate and property may not be solid bets if there are suddenly a lot of it to go around due to there being less of us around. Then again, city growth seems stable.
Another point is what happens to stock markets when there are less consumers and producers. Stagnating GDP and indices do not make attractive investments. Where do I invest my hard earned cash then? Private elderly care, drug companies, robotics companies?
We should probably look to the countries mentioned in the article, like South Korea or Japan for answers. But I'm not sure I'm able to pick out winning strategies looking at those, or even be sure they would work where I'm based.
I'm curious what your thoughts are - how do you invest and prepare for the next fifty years?
I realize this is a selfish comment to make, but shoring up oneself is at least actionable for us as individuals, in addition to trying to make the world a better place for everyone else.
The problem becomes the banks financing private ownership of the robots. Maybe the populations livelihood shouldn't be a profit center. Or in the case of the modern economy, where consistent profit is failure, an wealth extraction growth center.
Maybe there is a Star-Trek utopia at the far end, but in the meantime we are looking at potentially several years where me and a chunk of other white-collar workers are unemployable. I'm not sure UBI will be enacted before a large chunk of the general population is unemployable. And how will we fund UBI? Taxing the automators? They can just move their business to a tax haven.
Maybe I can find a job in some sector that's hard to automate, but I imagine a lot of people will be looking for those jobs. And that would probably lead to a pay cut.
So, what then if we want to maintain or even improve our standard of living? Invest in tech stocks? Sure. But we will still need to pick out winners or spread our bets. Will the gains in the stock market be enough to cancel out job loss?
Stock market? As you write - what will happen when the next generation of consumers and workers won't be born? On the other hand it is clear that market is anything but rational, and maybe it doesn't really need people in the same way internet doesn't need real people. Maybe the future is bots trading with each other, pumping up the bubble.
Bonds? The same problem, lack of next generations.
Real estate? Land? Maybe if you already have something in very good location, though even then I am a bit skeptical.
Then one needs to remember that money is just a number. It doesn't matter how much digits you have, but what can you get with them - real resources and services. So maybe the question is wrong from the very beginning.
I sometimes believe that ironically the best insurance in childless world are your own children. Unless, of course, we will face a scenario where old people, constituting majority of the population, will squeeze those few remaining young hard to get their pensions and healthcare. Yes, the same people that today preach about how it is good to not have children etc. will be first to put a boot on them in the future. For this reason I expect growing tensions between those people with children and childless ones.
This is why I constantly find most such discussions on demography pointless, as participants rarely understand how everything in our society depends on the assumption that no longer holds - that there will be more people, and that young will be more numerous than old.
In the end probably best things to safeguard you in the upcoming crisis will be the same as always - local community, family (including children), friends and your own skills. People living in more agrarian societies, or just in the countryside, generally have better situation in that regard.
Jokes aside I agree with you on strengthening bonds with local community, and it's something that many people neglect, not even knowing their neighbors. Especially so for city dwellers. Strong social bonds are an end in its' own right!
On your agrarian note I wonder if we will see a return to the country side as younger people are priced out of cities and more jobs accept remote work. Then again, RTO and "affordable" rentals may nullify that. But as real estate prices grow I keep wondering how anyone has the money to buy real estate in the city any more. Corporations I guess.
Regarding money being just a number I don't disagree exactly, but it sure feels like my flavor of white collar work might be among the first to be automated. If not, and the stock market flat-lines and taxes shoot up because we need to support the super-centenarians then my investments and cash flow are shot. I don't count on UBI to save me before pretty much everyone is out of a job, and in the meanwhile I will need to exchange money for goods that I'm not certain will plummet in price to match my lack of funds. So that's part of the reason I'm thinking about how to hedge or even gain in a future that might look different from our past.
I feel like a lot of people are vaguely aware of the skewed demography in the northern hemisphere, but I don't feel like there is a lot of talk about how it will affect the way we work and invest.
Nobody actually thinks there was never a population drop. The issue is there never was an economic, pension and welfare system built on population growth, so that when populations did dip, nobody was affected by the dip.
But on the contrary, in the past of agrarian societies, population declines massively benefited the working class, as they had more bargaining power with the landlords.
This doesn't work in the economies and societies of today when your retirement depends on there being constant economic and population growth.
> Because Homo sapiens went through a series of near extinction level events before eventually triumphing – periodically reduced to a few thousand surviving members clinging on in a handful of African enclaves – we have very little genetic variation. The human family tree spreads out from a few individuals to encompass all of us.
Ban birth control pill
Ban Abortion
Largely limit social media
Subsidize recreational activities like bars and other such drugs
After people have accidental kids, they will figure out the food, housing and so on.
Why isn’t this the default position?
The most firmly predictable position is that every biological species will go away eventually. Even humans are vastly different chimeral species from the proto-humans that made up modern anatomical human.
Most europeans have significant Neanderthal genetics, and yet all Neanderthal are existinct. Same with homo denisovian, habilis, etc…
As a species working on transitioning human level intelligence into something that can last longer than human species should be our only goal.
The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over regular people and kills their vibe for having kids. And in poorer countries, it's solar panels and TikTok exploding everywhere, giving way too many fun distractions to keep things lively. But the real root of it all? It's baked into the political systems and setups. Still, barely anyone wants to face the music and admit their "great" democracy and any other policical system is straight-up trash.
This article just flat-out refuses to face the real damn problem.
Either you're banking on robots to save the day, or you gotta crank up the birth rate. But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better. Thing is, none of those are any more doable than hoping robots magically fix everything.
Generally, populations with higher birth rates come from poorer countries or communities with lower living standards. Israel is the only major exception, but once you analyze the social strata it becomes clear why: higher-income groups still have lower fertility than the religious ones (especially the ultra-Orthodox and Arab Muslims) by a wide margin, even though the higher-income groups still have higher birth rates than other OECD countries. This creates long-term strains on society.
Another interesting fact is that groups with higher socioeconomic status (SES) tend to have lower birth rates. If SES correlates with IQ, then there’s an uncomfortable but politically incorrect implication: the smarter groups are having fewer children, while the less advantaged groups are having more. A few generations later, it’s not hard to see where this leads — human intelligence may trend downward. That is simply evolution at work.
Climate change, wars, pandemics, and natural disasters won’t wipe out humanity; we’ve survived all of those and recovered. But demographic collapse driven by high living standards is new territory, and I am genuinely, deeply worried.
Which is to say, you can make the point you're making without going out on a politically (and probably scientifically) incorrect limb.
stage right enter homo paganicus, accompanied by those twins homo philosiphus and homo philobaccus
pass the wine around.
True story, I took a course in environmental microbiology, and at a certain point, the instructor had a slide titled, "Ideal Conditions for Reproduction" and below that the words, "A Swiss Chalet on a cold night, a bottle of wine, and a warm fireplace"
Pressure seems to be another factor why many women don't have kids. That and mixed messages about what constitutes a good person and not being told that your fertility starts tanking after 30
It baffles me that science books in school don't have a nice graph showing how fertility changes with age. It's plain negligence. It causes people to set unrealistic expectations regarding their expected life trajectory.
I remember the freak-out of the 90s. The world was going to be at 10 billion humans and unsustainable, leading to world-wide famine.
Now we're at the other end. It will cycle, the human race will continue.
They have been getting it wrong for a long time, assuming that the gradual decrease in birthrate will stop, only to be proven wrong.
They can't just extrapolate assuming that birth rates will keep dropping since that would reduce the birthrate to 0. So they do the next best thing and assume it will stay constant.
But in reality, we just don't know which way it will go.
https://vimeo.com/1039295733 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
Don't worry. Enjoy the ride...
It’s why CO2e levels continue to accelerate, why heating has similarly accelerated such that we might see more heating in the next 10 than we have in the last 75, and why we are still on the absolute worst-case-path-possible, all because of “business as usual” being too profitable to ignore.
We’re fucked, not because we aren’t doing anything, but because those who can are the 1% who aren’t, and those who actually want to do something are the 99% who have absolutely no power to affect the former.
They are "plummeting around the world at the same time," they just didn't start plummeting everywhere at the same time.
> The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.
Except Africa can't fill the gap for everywhere else, and if immigration is the "solution" then what do you do about Africa after it's been sucked dry of its prime labor force? Just leave all its poor elderly to die on their own?
This is pedantic. Do you understand what "at the same time" means? By the time birth rates plummet below replacement rate in Africa, they would have risen well above replacement again in Europe and North America.
> Except Africa can't fill the gap for everywhere else, and if immigration is the "solution" then what do you do about Africa after it's been sucked dry of its prime labor force? Just leave all its poor elderly to die on their own?
We won't need to import labor from Africa when they have their own labor shortage because the birth rate in the US would have already recovered. The labor gap won't hit everywhere at the same time. That's why immigration works. In fact, Africa might need to import labor from America when the gap hits them.
The simple answer is that our current way of life (in the west at least) does not accommodate kids. We USED to have kids because they were an economic benefit to agrerian cultures, but have since become a burden since our society does not make time or resources for them, least of which is physical space when you consider urban life.
IF we want to increase the birth rate again, we need to shift our lifestyles away from being as career centric as they are today. We could for instance, remove the stigma of working part time or having a stay at home parent. We could encourage people not to grind long hours to climb the corporate ladder. Actually fix the housing problem without bending to NIMBYists and investors and provide affordable/accessible childcare.
Since children are the future tax-base and labor force of a nation, pay parents for raising kids, like its a job. It is kind of gross to view children in this perspective, but if we are talking about economics, well-adjusted children are just as much an input just as much as energy is.
Technologically speaking, we as a species are basically magic at this point, so I reject the notion that strategically recovering the birth rate is impossible, rather there is no will to.
>Ban Abortion
Addressed in the article, but I'll reiterate here: Ceausescu's tried and failed.
Also, during Ceausescu reign, there was no social media, there was no TV, and housing was literally handed out by the regime for almost nothing.
It didn't matter. Fertility rate still went down. And the unwanted kids ended up in large numbers in the grim orphanages.
Even North Korea has to encourage women to give birth[0]; the Kim dynasty can’t simply issue an order and shoot anyone who disobeys. It simply doesn’t work that way.
[0]: https://www.voanews.com/a/north-korea-s-kim-calls-for-women-...
The birth rate fell in North Korea because people are genuinely starving, whereas in other places it's mostly because of birth control. These are not comparable situations.
Thankfully most people have realized such things are insane and sexist, and don't want to see millions of more kids born to parents unable to properly care for them.
Nazi-Germany had a pretty illiberal and authoritarian family policy which basically reduced women to their role as housewives and mothers by banning married women from the job market and incentivizing having multiple children. They didn't achieve their goal of increasing the birth rate in any significant means. Their family policy also backfired hard during the war. Because women were not supposed to work and received financial support in the absence of their husbands, women refused to go to work during the hot phase of the war. Note that this was in a time where access to birth control was practically non-existent and access to abortion difficult.
Socialist Romania did all that during communist rule and it exploded spectacularly 30+ years later when communism ended, that we're still feeling the negative backlash effects today.
The answer to birth rate issues, is not more forced government intervention, but less to none of it. The reason we're in a mess in the west is the governments putting too many thumbs on the economic and regulatory scales for far too long, manipulating the natural order of life. Modern industrialized highly skilled societies are detrimental to human biological reproduction.
If you built an economic system where kids need to leave the parents' village to go spend time grinding studying and upskilling till their mid 20s in a big city and then working till their mid 30s before they afford to move out of shoebox, with their parents nowhere near to help with childcare, you can't be surprised demographics collapse. As per the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child.
You can't fuck with mother nature and not have it fuck you back. It's Newton's Third Law.
Plus, contrary to Reaganomics, the economy can't grow infinitely and neither can the population. Everything created by man eventually has a plateau and an end. So then why not reform the dated and broken "infinite growth" Ponzi-scheme economic system now towards a more sustainable model, instead of delaying its inevitable failure with stuff like 50 year mortgages and unlimited migration?
It is a combination of consumerist, pseudo-individulistic, hedonistic, nihilistic culture, economic exploitation under late-stage capitalism, destruction of familial and local ties, access to birth control, women emancipation etc.
Even such authoritarian countries like China are still very much soaked in the same systemic goo, so you may ban abortions if you like, but that won't change much.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pi...
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
If you are for women rights etc., then you have to accept that this includes much lower birth rates (as having childrend is not the only way to survive).
Birth rates are only up in countries without any social development of women rights.
Or maybe, just maybe,having kids just isnt that great and people (and especially women) are finally realising it.
Reproduction's a straight-up genetic instinct in humans. You're basically talking about something so screwed up that it makes people straight-up ignore their built-in drive to have kids.
Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism (including capitalism-inflected feminism that idealizes careers, which is pretty much all mainstream feminism).
Under the current system you exist to be maximally exploited to increase profits (ideally consuming all your capacity, including that which you'd use to reproduce and raise children), and childcare (socialized or no) is a foolish attempt to solve that problem with more of the problem (and of course that doesn't actually work).
The solution is a system the allocates a significant fraction of everyone's labor to cultural continuity (reproduction, child-rearing, and civic engagement), which would require a significant re-ordering of priorities.
It doesn't really fit the picture. Capitalism is about 250 years old and most of that time it correlated with a massive population explosion, not a collapse. The current world also isn't uniformly capitalist. Socioeconomic conditions and systems differ across the globe, but the collapse seems to be nearly universal.
There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school and we mostly eliminated teenage pregnancies in the developed world. Which is likely better for the socioeconomic level of the now-not-mothers, but it also has negative biological effects and sank the overall birth rate in a non-trivial way.
What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy. That is a very small subset of "capitalism", though.
solve this: - Housing issues. - Income issues. - Care and time issues.
It's really alarming when governments see their society collapsing and do nothing, if you have such government, remove it, it's a stupid government.
Homo economicus...
Sex is the straight-up genetic instinct with a strong drive. It used to correlate very closely with reproduction, so the difference between the two was meaningless. The issue is we managed to decouple them, with modern reliable hormonal birth control.
No - this time it is really different :-)
(apart from things like climate change etc.)
Apparently there is another bottleneck ~900K years ago that has decent fossil record support but the Toba one is more disputed.
What makes you think they will rise again in a timely manner? Demographers naively predicted the rates would stop decreasing and magicaly stabilize close to replacement levels, and failed miserably. To my best knowledge there is no indication the current trends will reverse or at least stabilize any soon.
[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725009
Due note, I'm citing these sources because they show the problem, not because their conclusions are sound.
Capitalism probably not the only cause, but I think it's a pretty central cause, and may be driving some of the other causes. I also think its worth pointing out because it can be one of those things that's so familiar that it can become invisible.
Birth control technology is probably the other big cause, because it would have the effect of "unblocking" the effect of other cultural trends on birthrate.
> There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school...
I assume you're talking about 18-22, but my impression is that historically, most women had their first children after that age, even before widespread college education.
I think a bigger factor is probably early focus on career pushing many women to try to start having children even later in their late 20s/early 30s. And that goes back to capitalist workplaces being pretty unaccommodating to parents (it's a bit better now, but work still demands your first priority to be your work).
> What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy.
That's not that new though: the book Bowling Alone was published in 2000 and is apparently based off a 1995 essay. COVID and smartphones just accelerated existing trends.
In cities and in richer families, yes. In rural settings, everything was sped up a bit, and, until very recently, most population worldwide was rural. Even if we look at highly fertile regions today (Afghanistan, Niger, Chad...), the first-time mothers tend to be between 16 and 18 and live outside the few cities that are there.
My own grandmother grew up in a rather underdeveloped corner of Slovakia in the 1930s (no electricity, wooden huts etc.), and a peasant girl who wouldn't be at least betrothed by 20 was seen as a bit weird.
Quite a lot of our previous fecundity was driven by rural mothers having six or seven children. This was a major source of "kid surplus". The urban population was never as fertile, plus there was some extra mortality from diseases and higher cost of food.
The future you hope for is not less bleak and dystopian than what you try to avoid this way. As always when technology is supposed to bring salvation.
Tech cannot promise anything. That's silly! There are people, on the other hand, that go around and preach their gospel, where technology is placed in the center.