Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

In My Humble Opinion
1081

No, he isn’t.

Scale economics is the idea that producing 1,000 parts at a factory coats a certain amount per part, but there’s also a big startup cost, and various fixed costs (the warehouse costs the same to light regardless of how many machines you put in it, for example). If you did all the work to make 1,000 parts, you’re better off making 10,000 parts at the factory instead of making 10 factories across the country to make 10,000 parts.

@Dr.Strangelove, unless I mistook him, is not talking about that. He’s saying that if there are people doing a task, they will come up with new innovations every so often. If you have more people doing more of the task, they will come up with new ways of doing the task more often. And when they do come up with an innovation, it can quickly be applied to everyone, so the bigger economy gets more productive at a faster rate.

That’s a distinct idea from economies of scale (although the bigger society would benefit from that too).

You guys are talking right past each other.

@Dr.Strangelove is saying that if there are two societies where all is equal other than population, the bigger society will produce more output. That’s obviously true.

You’re saying “any real pair of societies we look at where one is much bigger than the other had all kinds of other changes that impacted per Capita productivity”. Sure, that’s true. It has nothing to do with anything @Dr.Strangelove said.

It would probably be impossible, not just difficult.

Yes.

You know that if you think you’ll be happier without an iPhone, you can just not get one? You don’t have to push for modern society to be abolished for everyone else, too.

Then why don’t you live in the woods like the majority of your ancestors since we split from chimps?

1082

I will continue to bang my head a little bit longer, and use Israel as the specific case.

Imagine Israel suddenly has, poof, a whole bunch of highly fertile arable land. Magic wand. Do you think Israel would need to devote 25% of its population to agriculture in order to feed itself? Do you think that they would become less productive in science and technology if they were self sufficient in food production or even somehow a net food exporter?

For reference here’s America’s numbers. America has typically been a net food exporter, only recently slightly moving to a net importer but not by much.

Agriculture and its related industries provide 10.4 percent of U.S. employment | Economic Research Service.

And China with its huge population is a net importer of food, has been for decades, and is only now catching up to the much smaller US in innovation.

This bump on my forehead hurts.

1083

Can they keep importing food from the rest of the world? If so, nope, they’d probably choose to maintain their comparative advantage in high tech rather than go heavily into agriculture.

Is Israel transported to some other plane of existence, where there’s an endless stretch of fertile land surrounding it and no other people to import food from? Then it probably wouldn’t take a full quarter of the population, but yeah, at least 10-20% of workers would have to stop doing whatever they’re doing and start farming.

Israel right now is a net importer of food. In order to become self sufficient or a net exporter, a good portion of the population would have to dedicate their time to food production. It may not be 25%, but it would be much closer to that number than to 0.7%.

Of course in that scenario Israel’s output of high tech goods and innovation would greatly decrease. A large number of people previously doing those things are now farming. How could it not decrease the other outputs?

1084

You are really missing the very obvious point. We exist as social creatures. Yes, if I lived in the woods with a group of hunter gathers, grew up there, was able to have food shelter and health, I would likely be as happy entertaining myself making things (functional and just art) out of wood and stone, sitting around at night listening to stories and playing games, as I am streaming a movie made by an international work flow. I exist in this context. I don’t think I’d be happier in that case either. There is to some extent a power window phenomenon: I was thrilled with my first car that had roll down windows. Couldn’t be happier. First car I saw with power windows I thought how dumb. Just something to break. Of course soon I wouldn’t buy a car that did not have power windows. Now my car has technology that 20 year old me would marvel at. I am happy with my car. Honestly not as happy as I was with the used car with roll down windows. But of course that car now wouldn’t make me as happy. Raise the bar and the new height soon becomes not more but just baseline.

1085

That’s a rather myopic and geocentric opinion.

Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world. They have, according to the CIA World Fact Book, a population of about 13.6M. They have 14 000 landlines and 8.65M cell phone subscriptions.

Nigeria is quickly reaching a population of 240M. They have 112K land lines, 225 million cell phones. Tiny Bhutan has a pop. of about 900K, 18K landlines and 750K cell phones.

The cellphone spread in developing countries is amazing. And I hope I don’t have to explain why or how. The advent of the smart phone has made the Internet accessible to many, many billions, even billions of people in the poorer part of the world. Even if they use it to play Angry Birds.

So yes, the world, as you phrased it in the first post i quoted, is a better place because of smart phones. Whether you are happier than your grandfather is a question only you can answer.

1086

United States direct on farm is 1.2% of employment. Just over 10% for the complete industry. BOTH are closer to 0.7 than 25. If Israel only matched the US in application of high production technologies.

That does not follow. People would move from other less highly paid jobs to agriculture, not from the highest paid jobs. And there would more innovation to require less of the lower paid other jobs that they moved from.

@Charlie_Tan you are talking across points. Yes feeding that many people requires increased productivity and technology (including smart phones) is how that has been achieved. But the “happiness” is in having a tool that meets those needs. Is a person in Burundi who has those needs marginally met today using a cell phone, happier than a person there a century ago who had those needs marginally met without using a cell phone?

And btw

Nah. I phrased it as “happier.” Not “better.”

1087

But how will I make phone calls in public now that all the pay phones are gone?

1088

I don’t know. We’d have to ask a person in Burundi. And happiness is an elusive concept to quantify (sorry about that BTW).

From my myopic and geocentric position, I would say yes. Many people from Sub-saharan Africa are migrating, to cities, other countries and a lucky(?) few who survive crossing the Med. I think they are, in fact, happier that they can communicate cheaply and easily with people back home.

My initial reaction to your posts were along lines I’ve been thinking about myself. I’ve had a cell phone since the mid 90’s and a computer at home since '91. Am I happier today than I was in the 80’s? In some ways yes, in other ways no. But I think that many people who are less fortunate than I are actually happier that they have a cheap and easy way to communicate.

1089

That’s not the way happiness works. We are a social special, and it matters to us what our peers have. It especially matters to us how our peers communicate. Cutting myself off from society by refusing to use a cell phone would make me unhappy, in a way that i wasn’t unhappy before cellphones were invented.

I’m not lobbying to eliminate cell phones. Nor to reduce the human population to 10M. But your arguments are extremely naive.

And, technologies like cell phones, that make it possible for someone in Burundi to join this message board increases the connectivity of the human population. That’s probably not important than the raw number of humans to spur innovation. So yes, i hope we maintain the infrastructure (and population) to make cell phones. That doesn’t require a growing population. I bet we could maintain all of modern technology with a billion well-fed, healthy, connected people.

1090

Thousands of generations of humans got by without pay phones or any other kind of phone, you’ll be fine.

1091

Sure. Let me pose another hypothetical, then. If there was a portal you could step through at which point you’d be born in some other, earlier time in history, instead of today, would you go through?

For me, the answer is absolutely 100% no. If anything, I’d consider rolling the dice on a portal that let me be born further into the future. But there is no time in the past that I’d have rather lived in.

Are you (or @DSeid) saying you disagree?

1092

This is why every single advance in human civilization was invented in China… oh, wait…

Thinking past this obvious counterexample to the basis of your argument, the bottom line is that you’re making the phrase “all else being equal” do work that make the Labors of Hercules look like a spa vacation, especially since the downsides of larger populations (more pollution, less elbow room) are among the very factors that make all else unequal (the 10,000 farmers in the other valley aren’t gonna invent much of anything, what with their efforts being taken up with trying to get enough land to farm and keeping the other 9,999 off it).

1093

For most of history, China was indeed one of the great centers of innovation, yes. Were you not aware of this?

The writing system everyone in East Asia derives their writing systems from… Gunpowder… Paper… Printing presses… Repeating crossbows… Rockets… The compass… Metallurgical techniques… Need I really go on?

1094

Is this the same “most of history” you were talking about earlier?

You’re right – recent history is a better model for what we want to emulate. I don’t see anything in recent history that suggests that low birthrates and gradual population declines are incompatible with accelerating technological progress, given that the two phenomena tend to occur within the same societies.

1095

Sure, it was a shitty time for most people living through it (especially the half of them that didn’t make it to the ripe old age of five). What’s your point?

To be clear, the West only approached China technologically at two points in history - under the Roman Empire, which was the only point when Europeans had a polity with a similar population to contemporary China’s, and after the Enlightenment, when the scientific method changed the rules of the game enough that the West could catch up and surpass China without similarly large population levels.

The West used that temporary advantage (and it was only temporary, because the rest of the world adopted these same ideas) to basically conquer the world, and China is still recovering from that.

Of the Western countries that adopted these principles early enough to gain that initial advantage, it is - of course - the most populous one that has achieved the greatest technological and economic development. That being the United States.

I’m not sure that anyone said it’s incompatible?

The statement made was that if you have two societies that are equal in all but size, the bigger one will, obviously, develop faster.

1096

Are you actually claiming that the growth of the U.S. to a global power is intrinsically tied to population size, and starting early? Because these things do not match up. The first and second industrial revolution in the U.S. started when the population was quite low, and it was in fact that low population that precipitated said industrialization (e.g. Erie Canal, railroads).

As Western Europe industrialized in the mid-to-late 1700s, the United States remained agrarian with resource processing, gristmills, and sawmills being the main industrial, non-agrarian output. As demand for U.S. resources increased, canals and railroads became important to the economic growth as transportation necessitated and the U.S. population was sparse, especially in areas where resources were being extracted such as the American frontier.

1097

Yes, America’s rise to world power status corresponded to it’s population growth. I’m not sure why we would care about America’s first and second industrial revolutions, when it was essentially a backwater resource extraction site for larger and more powerful European powers. During the time period you’re talking about, America got its ass kicked in the War of 1812.

America first demonstrated its position as a global superpower in 1898 when it defeated Spain in the Spanish-American war.

We can go a bit earlier since the US was presumably capable of being a mighty world power before it actually demonstrated that it was; by 1890 the US population was 60 million, which was more than any European power.

America became a behemoth when it was big enough to do so.

1098

It is an interesting hypothetical and in a second I’ll play. But it really misses what I’m getting at. So after I play yours, you play the one I offer.

Different answer slightly as to whether or not I go back with the knowledge I now possess or not. With and I can, pick my time right, become a person of immense power, if that was my jam, or save many lives and prevent much suffering if that was my thing. But I suspect that’s not the game you want. So blank slate. I have no advantages, and no current car power windows or streaming services as my current bar.

I’d avoid a time of famine, disease, or great wars. I’d prefer a society with less inequality than we currently have. I definitely don’t want to be on the short end of that stick and don’t want to living a life of luxury at the expense of exploiting others. Best if it is a time of emerging new ideas and standards of living rising. So I’ll land on classical Greece. Democracy an emerging concept, not one in retreat. Great thinkers coming up with amazing new ideas. Sounds good.

My hypothetical to you first gets you to imagine a first time you got some thing you had been wanting, like me and that first car, and remember how happy you were to get it. Maybe it was the extra large candy bar. A new bike. Or like my example the used car.

Now imagine getting it today. Of course getting it today is contrasted to what you now have and have had. It wouldn’t result in the same happiness. But that happiness you experienced, that you remembered, was still very real and very large, even though the item now would make you scrunch your face up.

What is this thread about again?

The world is capable of having happy people, possibly fewer in misery, with fewer numbers. And it is capable of the same with more, to a point, with that point dependent on how well we humans manage things, and the more we are in numbers the smaller our margins for errors likely become.

Most of human happiness and human misery is imposed by how humans interact with each other at every population size. Better technology and numbers amplifies the capacity for impacting both, definitely to cause misery and to decrease it, if not to cause happiness.

An upside down demographic pyramid is a major challenge for any economy. We can disagree about the desirability of increasing absolute human population size on the confined space of this planet, vs maintaining where we are or even a very gradual decrease, and agree on that.

1099

Emphasis mine.

My reaction to that is:

That’s a joke, right?

1100

Ok, what’s the hypothetical question?

It is also imposed by how humans interact with their surrounding reality. Things like availability of shelter, or cancer, or bacterial infections.