Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

In My Humble Opinion
1041

Kids between the ages of 2-15 are a) not working much and b) going to school. Never mind those 16-21 and beyond. Pencil pushers over 65 often work. So the dependency ratio is a simplification. What’s good about it is that it’s a constant metric from 1950 to now.

My point is that looking at elderly ratios alone is misleading and that the dependency ratio provides a useful corrective.

I vehemently oppose birthrates below replacement over the long run. That leads to extinction. I vehemently oppose birthrates above replacement over the long run. That leads to resource collapse followed by population collapse. I valiantly engage with an army of straw men to defend my position.

More seriously, eldercare is and will be a challenge facing forwards. Luckily, the US’s problem lags behind many other advanced countries. South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Puerto Rico have fertility rates below 1.0. Replacement is 2.1. Yikes! Japan and Spain are at 1.23; Italy is at 1.21. Learned demographic study and commentary would be interesting.

1042

This seems like a fine, defensible position. :grinning_face:

1043

The effects of less humans are pretty good.

1044

This comment, and the realistic possibility of advances the dramatically extend both lifespan and healthspan, get me thinking, but then confused trying to think it through. Help please.

I am thinking that lesser birthrates, or more precisely the upside down demographic pyramid, might not matter if people stay healthier and productive longer.

Imagine some cheap and highly effective intervention that greatly extends typical lifespan with excellent health and function up to the very end.

Take it to the absurd extreme: immortality. Always functional and productive. Clearly any fertility rate eventually produces too many people for the one planet to support.

How about less absurd and possibly not even fantastical: 120ish and in good health and productive until very close to the very end?

Anything less than replacement rates eventually results in decreasing population size but there is a significant increase first as no one is shuffling off the stage around 80ish, they instead stick around 50% longer.

As long as they stay healthy and productive until near the end the upside down pyramid doesn’t matter. 90 year olds, supercentarians even, not needing to be supported, they are instead part of a larger pool paying in to support those actually near the end.

Honestly I see the possibility of those advancements as realistic. GLP1 inhibitors will eventually become extremely cheap and will result in preventing many of the chronic diseases of aging. There is active work on other “Methuselah medications” aiming at the fundamental process of senescence itself.

But the least absurd hypothetical is not prolonging lifespan much at all, just prolonging healthspan to the point that people are able and interested in staying productive significantly longer. That seems much more realistic than incentivizing fertility rates to over replacement values.

1045

Not for the humans.

1046

For the survivors …

1047

Why not? Unless you are thinking of those never conceived?

There is no a priori reason that a future world with a fraction of humans in it cannot be one with a larger fraction being happier and fewer suffering. You don’t have to give up modern medicines, any technology, or reduce future innovation. (Nonsensical thoughts of innovation occurring like more widgets produced by more bodies dutifully ignored.)

1048

The actual real-world scenario we’re about to live through is where some populations are rapidly aging because of population decline. This will lower quality of life for all those people for some combination of reasons, like having to work more years or giving up luxuries because more resources have to go to caring for the elderly.

DrDeth and others seem oblivious to the fact that population isn’t the only thing that matters. The distribution of age is critical.

If you could wave a magic wand to move everyone to their maxmally productive role and guarantee everyone was educated and contributing to civilization, whether by science or engineering or medicine or art or otherwise, then sure. But if you had said magic wand, you could wave it on the current population and make everyone today 10x as productive. In a very short time we’d have a clean, sustainable civilization with minimal impact on the biosphere.

Since we don’t have said magic wand, we pretty much have to assume that reducing the population by N times will reduce productivity by N times. Since much of that productivity is shared among the whole population, it means everyone is worse off than before.

This applies to almost any kind of intellectual property. Take movies. Do we get a better variety of movies when the whole developed world contributes, or, say, just from Britain? Obviously it’s better to get movies from everyone.

Movies, TV, medicine, music, software, etc. all depend on having people.

1049

I’m not convinced that simply “having to work more years” automatically lowers the quality of life. Studies seem to indicate that about a third of retirees report being no happier in retirement than pre-retirement, and that the happiest retirees are the ones who keep doing stuff and staying connected with people.

This suggests that we should maybe be focusing our efforts on reforming, rather than abolishing, paid work for late-life workers. Some kind of career shift to work they consider fulfilling, with shorter hours and less physically taxing tasks, might actually make most retirees more happy than just quitting work altogether.

1050

If that’s the case, then we should be doing that today, gaining the benefits of productivity and happiness. Which means it’s still a net loss to have an aging population (even if they’re productive, they still need extra medical care relative to a younger one).

It’s the same problem as any “well, we can just do this” type argument. Maybe it’s true. But if so, we can do it now, which either nullifies the relative benefit or even makes it worse.

1051

Good idea. Have additional older workers contributing economically and increasing revenue resources now, and then we can have a surplus to draw on as the demographics shift and the aging population gets more expensive.

But that wasn’t my point. I was disagreeing with your specific claim about later retirement necessarily having a negative impact on the worker’s quality of life in particular.

Nobody’s trying to argue, AFAICT, that there will be no social and economic downsides to a (relatively slowly) aging population. The question is simply whether those downsides are realistically predicted to be catastrophic enough to justify (a) trying to bully people into having more children than they want, and/or (b) disregarding the negative impacts of growing populations on climate change, especially in developed countries.

1052

Gosh a lot to unpack there. Lots of assumptions that are questionable at best.

One. “Some” sure. But most are not facing “rapidly declining” and a gradual decline is sustainable.

Two.

As someone who could retire now and has no interest in doing so, am unsure if I ever will, I will dispute that “quality of life” is tied to no longer contributing, or how many luxuries you have. Now I won’t argue that fewer luxuries bring happiness either, but once basic needs are met mo stuff gives a very short term delta in happiness. It then is just the norm and people are back to their baseline. My WAG is that an increase in overall baseline happiness is based on more purpose and meaningful connection.

On review before posting, yes as @Kimstu points out! I type slow! And to your response, I refer to my previous post: part of doing that is advances in improving healthspan. A work in progress.

That would be a silly assumption. Per capita productivity has increased over history and dramatically in more recent history. The idea that there is some linear relationship to population size is unmoored from reality. (Simple case in point, the most inventive culture in the last century or so has arguably been the United States, and it is far from the most populous. Germany, the UK, even Switzerland, are way up there too.)

It is my personal taste but it is not obviously so for everyone. More pertinent is that we can have diverse cultures interacting in a less intensely crowded world. A less intensely crowded world may actually help preserve diversity! ISTM that we are currently moving towards greater homogenization of culture globally, which perhaps is equally obviously not better?

1053

That’s fine, but I did say “for some combination of reasons, like” as a caveat. I don’t know what the strongest reasons will be. I just gave a couple of possibilities. But overall, it’s obvious that the overall flow of resources goes from the young to the old. And as a population ages, this flow will increase unless something else changes.

I’ll add that “doing stuff and staying connected with people” is not necessarily the same thing as being productive. I don’t mean that putting around in one’s garden is a waste in some cosmic sense. But as far as society is concerned, it’s different than working your normal job for another 5 or 10 or 20 years.

I’m not sure everybody even realizes the difference between a low birth rate and a shrinking population, or between a population with even age demographics vs. ones with a normal vs. upside-down pyramid.

In case it’s not crystal-clear, my position is that places like South Korea face demographic disaster. Other places, like China, could avoid disaster if they were able to fix things now, but there’s no evidence that they’ll be able to do so. Places like the US are not yet a disaster, but could be in a few decades if trends continue, so it would be very much in our interest to figure out ways to avoid getting worse.

And everyone, wherever they live, will be harmed by this decline. Like K-Pop? Great, you can expect about 1/3 as much of it in 25 years. And that’s if the youth aren’t spending all their spare hours taking care of grandma.

Climate change will be made worse by low birth rates. The only actual solution is switching to clean energy, and that will require a young, energetic population that isn’t dedicated to taking care of the old. Again, population decline substantially lags birth rates, so there’s almost no benefit to reduced emissions for decades. But switching a coal plant to solar has benefits now.

This isn’t theoretical. China is seeing a slight decline in CO2 emissions despite rapid economic growth!
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This will accelerate further as time goes on. They are thankfully taking clean energy seriously now. Things would be much worse if they just waited for their population to start declining.

1054

Demographers refer to those concepts as mortality (lifespan) and morbidity (healthspan). Fries (1980) proposed a compression of morbidity hypothesis, whereby disability is postponed more than mortality is - it’s compressed towards the end of the lifespan. Evidence is mixed and tends to favor a more complex portrait. Basically there are conflicting trends across disease and country. Here’s one paper. Here’s a better one:

Here’s another by Fries in 2016.

Possible interventions in favor of compression include exercise and avoiding obesity and opiate addiction.

1055

I suspect you have an exceptionally luxurious definition of “basic needs” compared to the average human throughout history or even living today.

I’m sure you’ve heard the research that happiness rises with income up to around $75k/year. Already that is exceptionally rich. But the threshold is probably more like $500k/year, anyway.

Nonsense. I’m assuming “all else being equal,” and if you’re going to argue otherwise then it’s your burden of proof.

Obviously some societies are more productive than others. Unfortunately, it’s many of the most productive societies that are facing the most rapid decline, and the least productive ones that are still growing. So if anything we should expect the reverse; that as population shrinks, even the relative productivity will go down.

I’m not assuming that since it’s not critical to my argument. But I’m certainly not going to assume the opposite, either.

It’s free movement and unlimited communication that’s causing homogeneity, not population. If cheap travel and the internet break down due to civilizational collapse, maybe we’ll see an increase in heterogeneity, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing overall. And certainly not if the cause is a rise in extreme nationalism.

1056

Yes part of what I am referencing is compression of mortality, and advance in it beyond things like good nutrition, exercise, avoiding smoking, avoiding addiction, having social connections, and such. But I am also referencing staying productive contributors during that period, and advances in interventions beyond that list that more will actually do. :grinning:

There are many ways to interpret that data. One key aspect to that interpretation is that of course in societies with great wealth disparity those in the higher deciles experience status advantages. As societies go, relatively flatter tends to be associated with greater happiness overall.

I honestly do not believe Americans are overall happier now than they were when they had lots less stuff overall.

Nah. You are making a claim. Your burden. I simply look at examples and the rate of innovation in countries with high vs less high populations and densities over time. I don’t see a correlation. I see innovation frequency based much more on cultural aspects than on population size. Which makes sense.

1057

It’s not just about having stuff. It’s about “luxuries” like not having to work on a farm or in a mine until you’re physically crippled. “Luxuries” like tractors and advanced mining equipment gave us these things.

Absurd. How far down does your claim go? Is one person as productive as 8 billion?

The default, null assumption is that productivity scales with population when you control for confounding variables.

Great. Now you just have to prove that the culture will shift in a way that will increase per-capita productivity as the population decreases, even though high-productivity cultures are declining more rapidly than low-productivity ones.

1058

Your claim was a linear relation: n times less population means one nth produced. Per capita productivity is fixed. That simply has never been reality. Not for goods or for ideas. Productivity per capita of both has increased in a nonlinear fashion over time. Periods of great innovation and productivity increases in various societies have occurred in sudden leaps not related to sudden changes in absolute population.

There is very little doubt that per capita and absolute productivity will continue to increase unless limited by things like disasters, natural and anthropogenic. And there is a possibility that those increases can blunt the impact of the demographic issues this thread has been referencing. Given however an “everything else equal” demographic distribution, a future one that is smaller is likely to continue the historical increases in per capita productivity and have more to supply each person.

Is Switzerland less innovative or productive per capita because it has a smaller population? Is Israel? Has Japan been despite their being of much smaller population than China or India?

I don’t have to prove anything. I am not stating with confidence what will be the case if the overall global population gradually decreases. I merely dispute your certainty of what necessarily would be if that was the case. To my read what would happen is not contingent on the absolute population size but on many other factors. The position that the world needs more people for people to be happy and that a smaller global population would necessarily be unhappier is absolute balderdash.

1059

That’s not the default assumption among economists, at least as they define productivity.

Labor productivity = Output / manpower (which can be defined as per person or per hour)

Total factor productivity = A in the formula A*Q(L,K), where L is labor, K is capital, Q is some function (often this one). Total factor productivity is generally thought to be technology, but since it’s basically an unmeasured residual it could also be lots of other things.

Maybe you are defining productivity as output. But again, output can also be increased via more capital or better technology.

Anyway, if productivity increased with population substantially we’d see either the largest population countries be the richest ones (not the case) or accelerating growth as the population gets larger. Or maybe it’s a small effect that’s drowned out by others. But in that case, we aren’t reliant on population to produce technology, at least to one order of magnitude.

So… is there a relationship with population growth and productivity? Maybe. It could go in either direction, depending upon the country. I’m just saying it’s not a default assumption. Here’s a paper discussing one facet of the relationship.

I think the more interesting question is whether certain technologies have a minimum scale that a population half the existing size would preclude. Or a quarter. Or a tenth. Or a hundredth. I doubt it , or rather I suspect the proper measure is a minimum middle/upper class population base.

1060

Because other factors have changed. Due mainly to culture, as you already acknowledged (also technology itself, which goes back to productivity).

I am not claiming that all populations are equally productive. I’m claiming that if you have a magic wand that can convert this hypothetical smaller population into a high-productivity one, then you can also wave it on the current population, and then you are back to square one.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that such a magic wand exists, and if it did it would have to also overcome the fact that the cultural shifts due to fertility rate do not favor an increase in productivity.