The De-Population Bomb

https://www.hoover.org/research/de-population-bomb

by Eumenes • 4 years ago

25 120 4 years ago

I don't think it's surprising. People do things for ROI and specifically quality of life ROI.

Once the retirement system is socialized or provided by insurance the role of kids for future retirement support immediately goes out of the window and so is the ROI. You privately spend 1 million dollars each to raise them, but society gets to reap the rewards collectively. It's a losing proposition and only a non-smart person would commit to such agreement.

If countries want to raise their birthrates they should immediately liquidate all their pension funds and insurance funds (both public and private) and transfer the stock/bonds owned by such entities to the holders of such rights.

Also countries should stop policing how people raise their kids. Many parents might want a slightly more ignorant kid in the realm of philosophy/English/math... but prioritizing values of family and most importantly the only value that matters to them: taking care of parents as they enter old age , when I say taking care I mean both financially and socially.

Jensson• 4 years ago

You privately spend 1 million dollars each to raise them

Average kid costs $227k, not a million. Just wanted to clarify since that number was very off. The cost of raising a child is growing extremely quickly though, much faster than inflation.

https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/21/pf/cost_raising_child/index...

Edit: That was 10 years ago, probably higher today, but pretty sure it still isn't close to a million.

bombcar6• 4 years ago

That $250k or so number has been bandied about since the 90s. It’s an average and isn’t entirely useful (as education costs can be a huge portion of it depending on how you calculate it).

Kids are expensive but they can be as expensive as you want them to be, as evidenced by poor people having them.

sarchertech3• 4 years ago

The average cost per kid also goes down with the number of kids you have. Economies of scale, hand-me-downs, kids sharing rooms, older kids providing free childcare etc…

falcolas3• 4 years ago

$300,000 now, not including college or any major emergencies. Having a child with a birth defect or major disorder; it’s easy to see how the costs could easily reach the millions.

goethes_kind5• 4 years ago

Complete nonsense. People naturally do want to have kids. It is just very expensive to have them both in terms of time and energy. I do not know a single person my age (30) who thinks of kids as retirement insurance.

Frankly speaking, if I never get to have kids, I couldn't care less what happens to me when I'm an old fart, ideally I would never reach that age at all.

Bubble_Pop_225• 4 years ago

I do not know a single person my age (30) who thinks of kids as retirement insurance.

Well of course, because they don't need it due to the fact that it's already there in the form of socialized retirement.

Remove socialized retirement , pension funds etc. and people will start having more kids as they'd start seeing them as a retirement insurance yet again. As they were seen for the whole history of mankind (and still are in high fertility countries).

It's time we face the fact that people don't make kids out of love but out of need. If you remove the need and you'd remove the kids, which is what is happening.

nonethewiser4• 4 years ago

But if they are deciding not to have kids because they are expensive, doesnt that ultimately mean they dont want to have kids?

Let's take the semantics out of it. People are deciding to have kids less frequently. Obviously there are reasons for it.

hsn9158• 4 years ago

People will not like this, but the reason populations are shrinking is because women don't want to have many kids. Ask any modern woman, the majority view child rearing as a huge burden, and most would think three kids is way too much.

For perspective, my grand grand mother had 16 kids. All her grand grand children who are my generation that I know of have either two or three, with no apparent plans to have any more.

nonethewiser4• 4 years ago

Well this is obviously true. You can argue that its OK, or even good, but there is no questioning that women (and men even) are less inclined to want kids than before.

ceejayoz10• 4 years ago

Did your great grandmother want to have 16 kids, or is that just what happened?

bryanlarsen2• 4 years ago

Many women would like to have more children, but they don't because child rearing is a huge burden.

And if you ask any mother with >4 children she will tell you that 3 children is the maximal burden in terms of work. Once you have more than 4 children the job gets easier, not harder. Experience, older children pitching in, being forced to drop what's not important, et cetera. One father described it as "zone defense" rather than "man-on-man defense".

But the dollar cost does not go down. Time off work + $250K per child mean that only the rich can have more than 2 children.

goethes_kind5• 4 years ago

I ask many women already since I'm looking and that's a question to ask. I did not make your impression at all. Many say they want 2 or 3, but some say they want a big family. But maybe I am pre-filtering anyone who would say they want none.

What I would say, though, is that many women want to have kids later in life, and then this probably has an effect on the number of kids they get to have.

fennecfoxen2• 4 years ago

I do like that in this piece they call that out specifically and highlight the magnitude of what it would take to really move the needle on that (spending a double-digit percentage of GDP to actually compensate these women for their opportunity costs).

adaml_6233• 4 years ago

Sounds like you're also implying that populations are shrinking because modern men aren't prepared to make that extra burden bearable.

nonethewiser4• 4 years ago

Socializing the retirement system would make us MORE dependent on the birthrate. Social security draws from the working force to pay for currently retired. Its already breaking at the seams. If the working force increases and the retirees increase we are in trouble.

It would be better if people saved up for their own retirement over time and did not depend on the government forcing the working force to give up their income.

phlipski• 4 years ago

"It would be better if people saved up for their own retirement over time and did not depend on the government forcing the working force to give up their income."

The US had that exact system up until about 1935 - when Social Security was founded. It turns out that if we let people save for their own retirement, the vast majority will choose not to.

slavik81• 4 years ago

The money is an abstraction. If you look at the actual production and consumption, it's clear that the issue persists regardless of whether the retirement system is government-provided or funded through private savings.

You can't actually save up the things that retirees need. They will mostly require services. No matter how much cash has been set aside up to pay for it, the supply of services is largely dependent on the labour force available. The production and consumption of services needs to balance instantaneously.

ceejayoz10• 4 years ago

If countries want to raise their birthrates they should immediately liquidate all their pension funds and insurance funds (both public and private) and transfer the stock/bonds owned by such entities to the holders of such rights.

“Sweet, I’m putting all of it in Terra $LUNA!”

Welcome to a golden age of scams.

prottog5• 4 years ago

We're in the golden age of the wise elites in government protecting people from themselves, so pick your poison, I guess.

Juliate• 4 years ago

People do things for ROI and specifically quality of life ROI.

Right. The famous, old, debunked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus. Of course.

sveme3• 4 years ago

Most people don't do things for ROI. My kids were definitely not "done" with ROI considered. They are costly and time-consuming, but I love them.

Western countries with their lack of intergenerational support and lack of affordable child care while we have stagnating wages are probably the major reason.

IMTDb• 4 years ago

They are costly and time-consuming, but I love them.

That's your ROI; you spend time and energy raising them, caring for them, cleaning for them, providing for them. In return, they give you affection, love, you enjoy playing with them, or having conversation with them.

If you are someone who does not enjoy spending time with children, or do not think you will enjoy seeing them grow, you usually... avoid having children since you do not see the return.

At some point, you made the decision to have children because you think you would be happier with some.

bombcar6• 4 years ago

I’m imagining sitting down with the kids and explaining how Bobby’s performance is adequate but Suzy needs to really up her income because the ROI is just not there, and if she doesn’t we’ll be forced to acquire a new kid.

agent008t3• 4 years ago

Why were they "done"? How did you decide to have them?

Did you enjoy spending time with other toddlers so much, that you thought you would enjoy it more than all your other hobbies (which you may have to give up), that you wanted to be doing it during the majority of your downtime, have sleepless nights etc.?

bediger40002• 4 years ago

This is just more scare mongering. First it was Temperance, then Communism, the The Population Bomb, then Silent Spring, then the drug war, fear of nuclear winter, Earth Day, Left Behind, the War on Terror, these things are endless.

SanjayMehta• 4 years ago

Ozone layer, global warming, climate change, climate justice ...

After some time people just tune out.

pixl97• 4 years ago

And then death comes.

Tuning out real problems doesn't fix them.

ceejayoz10• 4 years ago

It’s a pity folks tune out the ozone layer. It’s one of our best examples of international cooperation to effectively fix a global problem.

aliqot2• 4 years ago

I'd like to hear arguments on why more people is a good thing. Everything indicates less people was better.

edit: Extra points for not using ponzinomics to justify it.

clircle• 4 years ago

Better divisions of labor

atemerev4• 4 years ago

Consumption. "Economic growth" relies on always increasing consumption. I am not saying that we should stop economic growth, but we might want to learn do it without bringing new consumers into the world, at least not making this obligatory.

aliqot2• 4 years ago

Are you asserting more people is a good thing or a bad thing?

I'm looking for those who assert it is a good thing. You said "we might want to learn do it without bringing new consumers into the world" which to me suggests it is not a good thing.

agent008t3• 4 years ago

"Economic growth" relies on always increasing consumption

That cannot possibly be true. A single person can consume a huge amount of resources - far more than any of us currently does. For example, by setting a building on fire, you have consumed that building. We already have a near-infinite capacity for consumption.

Or did you mean something different? If so, could you please explain it better? How can economic growth rely on increasing consumption? Because I would love to consume a yacht - where do I sign up to help economic growth by consuming one?

BiteCode_dev11• 4 years ago

All our economical and political systems are based on growth, and it's very hard to sustain growth if you don't have growing resources (energy, mineral, etc) input, innovation and population.

If the population goes down, the system will go through a phase of chaos before stabilising (E.G: retirement systems will default, factories will not have enought workers, companies not enought clients, loan will not get repaid...), and people are very afraid of that. Elon Musk has made the topic quite popular recently.

I would argue exponential growth being exponentially hard to maintain, the chances that the system collapse are the highest anyway. Better that it does with a decline in population than a decline in resources. We can stabilitise and recover more easily from the first, than from the other one.

There were several times in the history of humanity when we here just a few millions. If we plan, we can even control the fall instead of going full throttle.

But we won't plan, nobody wants to vote for the end of the good times. We will protest, fight to keep the growth, and we will crash. We always do.

atemerev4• 4 years ago

Stability is overrated.

Retric4• 4 years ago

All our economic and political systems are based on growth

Hardly, you can find plenty of societies that operated at a steady state or even a decline. Capitalism isn’t tied to growth it’s tied to efficiency. Companies don’t become more efficient than their competitors for all time, they become more or less efficient as new management and workers take over. Look at the biggest companies from 1920’s and most have failed or been taken over.

Shrinking populations don’t inherently destroy retirement systems they at most force people to work longer or receive fewer benefits. Social security for example hands people about a 10x benefit range based on contributions but if the minimum acceptable benefit is X, there isn’t an inherent need to hand out more than that.

Bubble_Pop_225• 4 years ago

Elon Musk has made the topic quite popular recently

Musk will make every argument for stability because he won the lottery and wants no more draws, people who are unhappy on the other hand might use some instability because it means a bunch of new draws with high frequency.

It's also the reason why every Senator, Representative, President of every country prioritizes stability.

The population at large might have a different opinion on the matter .

prottog5• 4 years ago

It's better for the people who are alive who otherwise wouldn't be. There will be a higher sum total of people who live, laugh, love.

BiteCode_dev11• 4 years ago

If there is much more mouths to feed that food, people will not laught a lot, and not love for very long.

falcolas3• 4 years ago

How so? If they aren't around, they're not going to be living, laughing, or loving.

ch4s3• 4 years ago

You can arrive at this from many systems of values. If you value human happiness then more people even if a little less happy margins means more human happiness. If you value more innovation and progress then more people give you more opportunities for some innovative genius to come along. If you value human life as intrinsically valuable then more is straightforwardly better.

Clearly I’m boiling down more complicated arguments to one sentence descriptions but I think the point is clear. Many human centered value systems can lead you to value more human life. If you have misanthropic values, then the opposite.

bryanlarsen2• 4 years ago

More people indefinitely is a bad thing. But unless "less people" means "kill the old people", the transition period to less people is an inverted pyramid, with more old people than young. And given how many human resources old people need to stay comfortable that will be a horrible world.

hnuser8472• 4 years ago

Cities are nations are currently built to support X number of people. If the population drastically decreases, the infrastructure won't automatically scale down with the population, so a smaller number of people will need to fund the maintenance of the existing infrastructure. Imagine the what happened to Detroit, but at the scale of an entire country.

Also, pensions are essentially socially-sanctioned pyramid schemes. They require ever greater numbers of young people in order to pay out the benefits for old people. If people stop having a kids, the age demographics of a country will switch from a pyramid shape to obelisk shape, with a smaller number of young people funding the retirement of a larger slice of old people. Young people will be forced to pay significantly higher taxes or retired people will be forced to relinquish some or all of their retirement benefits. Neither solution will result in a happy society.

falcolas3• 4 years ago

Also, pensions are essentially socially-sanctioned pyramid schemes. They require ever greater numbers of young people in order to pay out the benefits for old people.

I'm not sure I understand the mechanics behind this point of view.

1. There are always more significantly more people between the ages of 20 and 65 than there are over 65 - the ratio is currently about 5 to 1 in the US. We'd have to see a catastrophic level of depopulation for this to become untrue. Even if everybody stopped having kids tomorrow, it would take 20-30 years before the ratio became unreasonably unbalanced.

2. Social Security is in trouble because the government sees/has seen it as their private slush fund to spend on other things, not because it's inherently unsustainable.

adhesive_wombat• 4 years ago

In theory, as technology becomes more and more advanced, you can have enough specialists to fill a very large number of very deep supply chains.

When you have a primitive society, you just need a "wood guy", a "stone guy" and a "plants guy".

If you want to have fancy computers, you need things like "high pressure silane pump control loop guy".

Though I'm pretty sure the number of people needed to maintain the current level of technology is substantially less than 7 billion, because a lot of those people are stuck in subsistence farming and basically don't contribute to industry.

dsign2• 4 years ago

It is a matter of faith. Some people will believe that a rustic life is paradise. Most people who have experienced such life by necessity disagree. Some people may believe that they have it as good as it gets and would want no more. Three different doctrines.

For those in the "Progress church", there is always space for improvement. And under the assumption that we are the ruling intellect, then more people is needed to design more things that don't exist yet. Things: space-ships, space habitats, alternate biologies, video-games, new forms of VR, virtual worlds, new drugs, new lifestyles, new social orders, new ... Yes, we could and should get more working minds by simply improving standards of living all around the world, but there is a limit to that.

There is a material argument for not having more people and their creations: our tiny-winy planet and our ecosystems can't support them. But there is so much perfectly useless and boring dust out there...

osigurdson2• 4 years ago

Because humans are awesome.

fennecfoxen2• 4 years ago

People are great. Each person has intrinsic dignity and worth. Economic studies on safety and medicine spending and the like show us the demonstrated value of the lived experience of a single person is worth millions. All else being equal — a major caveat, of course — more people is better.

Imagine walking up to an arbitrary random person and saying “the world would be better off if you don’t exist.” Or better, imagine someone doing that to you. Not out of malice, not because you’re a bad person, not because you waste resources, just out of the premise that fewer people is a better thing intrinsically. That’d be a load of crap, right? Quod eras demonstrandum.

kypro• 4 years ago

Assume you're on an island with a finite amount of food, now run this experiment again.

The optimal number of humans depends on how finite resources are in an environment. Adding an extra person to an island with a shortage of resources would likely increase human suffering.

kmeisthax• 4 years ago

Smaller birth cohorts have less political power in a democracy. So regardless of the absolute scale of human civilization, shrinking birth rates means the children who do get born have less power relative to their parents until their parents die.

For context, the "Baby Boomers" were only overtaken in population by "Millenials" two years ago. That's a very long time for a group of people to enjoy political power owing purely due to when they were born. This means that political establishments become gerontocratic, as there are simply more old people to vote themselves into power.

The population-equals-power dynamic also plays out on smaller scales, too. Countries with shrinking populations are at risk of being invaded or having their economies collapse. I'm not going to argue in favor of infinite growth[0], but I will point out that certain things we are accustomed to require a minimum amount of people on both the supply and demand sides of the equation. We can see this in rural America, which has been sucked dry of its population. The only people who still live in small towns are the people who are unwilling or unable to leave, and many towns have collapsed purely due to lack of people living in them.

[0] Though I do want to point out that I haven't seen a good argument as to why degrowth won't come commensurate with a massive surge in ethnonationalism. The only society I can think of that was wholly devoid of economic growth was pre-Meiji-era Japan, and that was the result of literally sealing the country off for centuries, banning an entire religion, and enforcing a very rigid political hierarchy.

hackeraccount• 4 years ago

If you think things are as good as they can be then you don't need more people. If you want to improve things each person you add is a chance to come up with a solution.

ASalazarMX• 4 years ago

In reality, most of the human population is not looking for solutions. Countries with more population are not necessarily better than countries with smaller populations.

IMO, the best strategy is not playing number games and improve your current population instead, that way you increase the likelihood of problem solvers without increasing the pressure on the environment and the average quality of life.

tomjen32• 4 years ago

I have no idea what you mean by your made up word, but the simple fact is that people produce things of value, on average at least, and that means that more humans are valuable.

Then there is the power-law concern: while the typical human is producing things of value, some people are producing things of extreme value, such as break-through scientific and engineering, which benefits humans immensely.

This means that more humans can make more valuable things, and that by having fewer people we also have a higher chance to miss those exceptional humans.

None of this really should be in dispute for people on these boards.

Also while some years sucked, if you picked the high point of any five year period you will find that in almost all things the current period is the best. I will except only privacy.

atemerev4• 4 years ago

De-population is fine. Better reliance on automated manufacturing, better deal for the environment, less competition. I don't think we should do anything about it if it happens naturally, as the world is reaching its carrying capacity for humans.

dsign2• 4 years ago

This problem is not so hard to fix, neither so easy.

First, raising children shouldn't be an onerous business for two or just one; the current monogamous family is a construct from a few religions with outsize cultural influence (Paradoxically, in the absence of contraceptives monogamous families are good for population growth: you use the bare minimum of adults to raise more than a dozen kids. Ideal stuff if your goal is to go to war with the tribe on the other side of the Nile).

Second... well, second we should forsake heaven, and remain here. Let's keep working on life-extension and rejuvenation, and abolish death.

tetris11• 4 years ago

A return to co-parenting should absolutely happen. Back in the villages, kids were raised by a number of adults by proxy of kids staying overnight at each others houses, and this exists still in many societies.

The atomisation of the western world has forced parents to singlehandedly raise their kids and enact on them their specific faults and biases, whilst crippling everyone mentally and emotionally

danuker3• 4 years ago

Populations can adjust.

When there are too many people, and food is expensive or hard to get, people make fewer kids, or invest in making it cheaper (agriculture innovations - nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process [1]).

When there are too few people, and a lot of states rely on taxing youth to fund pensions and healthcare for elders, anyone able and willing to work will be paid better, attracting migrants or older workers.

[1] - Last paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Economic_and_env...

osigurdson2• 4 years ago

Take a current trend, extrapolate it out until the end of time, write a book about it. "Look at what happens with k^N when N is large and k is not 1" along with anecdotes and filler.

nopinsight• 4 years ago

Prof. Gary Becker (Nobel in economics) has linked the economics of fertility to economic growth since decades ago. His papers describe low fertility rates in many developed countries in the present pretty well.

Here's a review article of his work: https://docs.iza.org/dp8610.pdf

From the article:

"Becker, Murphy, and Tamura show that the economy exhibits two steady states, one in which income per capita stagnates and fertility is high, and one in which there is sustained growth in income per capita and fertility is low. Thus, the model provides a joint explanation for the demographic and economic differences between pre-industrial, Malthusian economies (characterized by stagnation, a low return to human capital, and high birth rates), and growing, industrial economies with low population growth."

fasteddie31003• 4 years ago

I think part of the instability in Russia right now is due to their population starting to decrease. Their leadership sees the writing on the wall that their demographic future looks bleak. The Ukraine war is their last chance to use their strength to get more resources. You can also see that they are moving Ukrainians to low population areas to increase their population.

The Ukraine War is literally a Russian de-population bomb. I wonder if we will see this trend in the future when China's population start to decline in the coming years.

sudden_dystopia• 4 years ago

I totally see the depopulation argument. But I also see the overpopulation argument, at least as it relates to our current standards of living/lifestyles, farming practices, and energy scarcity. We need innovation to keep pace with population increases, or else overpopulation is a real risk in my mind.

mdorazio• 4 years ago

I'm guessing a lot of commenters didn't actually read/listen to the entirety of this. Here's a summary:

- Globally, there's a drop in fertility rates

- The reasons for this are complicated, but the interview seems to conclude it's due to mindset among young people

- There's no reason this has to be disastrous

- However, in the US we're doing really poorly on most things that would make a shrinking native population workable (sensible immigration policy, stable social safety net, world-class education, etc.)

- Israel is an outlier in that it seems to be avoiding the fertility rate drop of industrialized nations

- The interviewers think American exceptionalism can win the day and either return us to higher fertility rates or figure out a way around it

Unfortunately, nowhere did I see them actually make a strong case that a significantly smaller population is a bad thing. The interview is two boomers. Would they argue that America in the 1970s/1980s when they were having the time of their lives had too few people? They also gloss over any positive impacts of lower population, like housing and the environment. And finally, they seem kind of out of touch with the experience of young people - there's some reference to a few metrics at the end (they seem to think young people are "afraid" or over-value autonomy), but I get the feeling these two people don't really understand why Millennials in particular are choosing fewer children.

The De-Population Bomb

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