Genuine question as someone who helps and advocates for women obtaining permanent birth control to dispose of unwanted fertility: why should younger cohorts care about population decline when most developed world socioeconomic systems do not care about those in need and providing living wages, affordable housing, affordable healthcare, etc? These systems of extraction want more fuel for their machines and only concern themselves with the structural demographic change rapidly occurring when it means they can’t issue more sovereign debt or extract more profits from workers and consumers. Perhaps the focus should be making a world worth having children into?
Is a bigger population really better? If we are worried about art and science, there are better ways of fostering it than getting people to have more babies. Or, if it really is about numbers, get talented people to have more children, not the average man. l
Great article. The idea that a smaller workforce relative to population boosts growth is contradicted by Italy and Japan. On the flip side, Africa's young populations face an even worse worker-to-population ratio - no expansionary effects there either. This really does point to an inverted-U curve. Too young? Slow growth. Too old? Slow-ish growth. Just as Chong-Bum An suggested way back in 2006.
I do think you're under-rating "tradition" though.
The *whole point* of tradition is to solve the problem that "Human beings are not especially good at making choices when the costs are delayed, diffused, and exponential" and that "we are much worse at intuiting how intuiting how millions of individually reasonable decisions compound across generations."
Tradition represents experiments that worked. It encodes hard-won lessons that you can't learn until it's too late or even can't learn across multiple lifetimes. Seems naive to think that the solution to this problem is for people to somehow adopt a rationalistic big picture view of how their choice to have children affects the broader society.
And dismissing people with traditionalist views as "polluting" debates with their "ideological" views severely under-rates the arguments for the instrumental benefits of tradition.
That didn't sound like a genuine question 😆. But please stop what you are doing and refocus your énergies on analysing what we need to create more affordable housing and healthcare, and then to helping achieve those conditions.
Your essay rightly criticizes Acemoglu et al. for moving too quickly from correlation to broad conclusions. Why should we be more confident in the reverse extrapolation that larger populations necessarily produce more art, science, and discovery? It seems equally plausible that beyond some level of scale, the institutional complexity required to sustain civilization suppresses the local experimentation, eccentricity, and life friction from which much creative work emerges. What evidence would distinguish between these possibilities?
This was really good, thanks
Genuine question as someone who helps and advocates for women obtaining permanent birth control to dispose of unwanted fertility: why should younger cohorts care about population decline when most developed world socioeconomic systems do not care about those in need and providing living wages, affordable housing, affordable healthcare, etc? These systems of extraction want more fuel for their machines and only concern themselves with the structural demographic change rapidly occurring when it means they can’t issue more sovereign debt or extract more profits from workers and consumers. Perhaps the focus should be making a world worth having children into?
Is a bigger population really better? If we are worried about art and science, there are better ways of fostering it than getting people to have more babies. Or, if it really is about numbers, get talented people to have more children, not the average man. l
Great article. The idea that a smaller workforce relative to population boosts growth is contradicted by Italy and Japan. On the flip side, Africa's young populations face an even worse worker-to-population ratio - no expansionary effects there either. This really does point to an inverted-U curve. Too young? Slow growth. Too old? Slow-ish growth. Just as Chong-Bum An suggested way back in 2006.
Nice post and critique.
I do think you're under-rating "tradition" though.
The *whole point* of tradition is to solve the problem that "Human beings are not especially good at making choices when the costs are delayed, diffused, and exponential" and that "we are much worse at intuiting how intuiting how millions of individually reasonable decisions compound across generations."
Tradition represents experiments that worked. It encodes hard-won lessons that you can't learn until it's too late or even can't learn across multiple lifetimes. Seems naive to think that the solution to this problem is for people to somehow adopt a rationalistic big picture view of how their choice to have children affects the broader society.
And dismissing people with traditionalist views as "polluting" debates with their "ideological" views severely under-rates the arguments for the instrumental benefits of tradition.
That didn't sound like a genuine question 😆. But please stop what you are doing and refocus your énergies on analysing what we need to create more affordable housing and healthcare, and then to helping achieve those conditions.
Your essay rightly criticizes Acemoglu et al. for moving too quickly from correlation to broad conclusions. Why should we be more confident in the reverse extrapolation that larger populations necessarily produce more art, science, and discovery? It seems equally plausible that beyond some level of scale, the institutional complexity required to sustain civilization suppresses the local experimentation, eccentricity, and life friction from which much creative work emerges. What evidence would distinguish between these possibilities?