Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

In My Humble Opinion
1121

Total nonsense. There are physical limitations as to how high a fever can get. But there’s no lower limit to fertility rate. It can just be zero, or very close to zero.

This sort of sloppy reasoning by analogy isn’t very useful at the best of times, but it’s especially useless when the analogy doesn’t remotely fit.

log(8000000/8000000000) / log(0.68/2.1) * 30 years = 183 years. That’s a 1000x reduction in population at South Korea’s current rates. The world isn’t there yet, but SK provides an existence proof that it can get there. There isn’t some natural factor where women become baby-crazed when the fertility rate drops too much. It can just stay that low, at least for a while.

And, as above, that’s an insane reduction in population that would totally eliminate a wide swath of technology. I doubt it could support any kind of computer industry.

1122

It’s not a game. :woman_shrugging: You are making a claim about how costly it is to have elderly people, so we need more babies. But what matters isn’t “number of elderly”, it’s roughly the ratio of people who are economically contributing to those who aren’t. And babies aren’t. And it’s mind boggling that people are wringing their hands about how will we possible care for all those old people while ignoring that many old people don’t actually need to be cared for, some are, in fact, still contributing to the economy.

1123

Why? (Forgive my late entrance to this thread)

1124

If anything, it’s the other way around. Contact with babies via friends and family members having them is a major cause of baby fever, and helps demystify them. And it’s socially isolating to have a kid when everyone else around you doesn’t, and is living a child free lifestyle focused on adult activities that parents will often be unable to attend.

1125

Older people manifestly require more health resources than younger ones. This is true even compared to children except at the moment of their birth. And older people produce less than those at peak years.

It’s the relative differences that matter, not the absolute ones, because we’re comparing how things will be vs. how they are now. Fine, some older people are still productive. How productive is the typical 80 year old compared to a 40 year old? Half? A quarter? And yes, I’m sure you can find all kinds of counterexamples where some particular 80 year old is substantially more productive than some 40 year old, but we’re talking about the trend for the whole society, not some isolated cases.

Take some country that has 90 million people in each of the 0-30, 30-60, and 60-90 year age ranges. We’ll say for the sake of argument that it’s sustainable.

Now apply SK’s fertility rate and wait 60 years. Now the 0-30 population is 10M, 30-60 is 30M, and 60-90 is 90M. Fine, you’ve reduced child care by a bit. But elder care is now a huge problem. That middle segment is carrying almost all the productive load. Even if the elders are semi-productive, this is still a much worse situation for almost everybody.

1126

Semiconductor manufacturing is way, way up on the “tech stack”. It’s the tip of the industrial pyramid.

Basically, take a computer chip and consider all the things that went into it. Then all the things that went into those components, and so on and so forth. How many steps before you get to raw materials? Starting with sand, what does it take to turn it into a chip? There’s no other industry that relies on so much else.

The problem is so large it’s hard to even know where to start. Ultrapure material processing, chemicals, lasers, optics, robotics, computer vision, the list goes on.

Of course, everything today is interconnected. You couldn’t run a farm in the modern way without computers, with GPS-guided tractors and so on. So in some sense all industries are just as dependent as the computer industry because they depend on computers. But if you replaced all computer-guided tractors with dumb diesel ones, you could still grow food, just somewhat less productively. Modern chips could not be made if you just didn’t have lasers, though, or any one of the thousands of chemicals they use, and so on.

1127

Thank you. That all makes sense But why would population loss endanger that?

1128

So- that wont happen with people being on the average a few years older and the population 10% less rather than 20% more?

Due to submarine warfare. The UK and other industrialized nations import more than they export in food (the US imports a lot of food, but it exports way more) a few nations are “Food Insecure”-

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-countries-importing-the-most-food-in-the-world.html

Most are in Africa.

Exactly- and we Americans (and quite a few other nations) can work later. When I was a kid, I saw dad retire at 5o or 55 after 30 years of hard factory work- then die before they got Social Security. People are healthier and can work later- even 70 yos can contribute ( i dont do much work for salary anymore but I do volunteer- and that is still contributing).

1129

Because they are incredibly advanced technologies at the tail end of incredibly complex production chains. It takes large amounts of incredibly niche resources to produce them. Those resources in and of themselves are incredibly complex to produce. You need huge amounts of surplus at every part of the dependency tree, from the raw materials of your end products to the food the workers are eating and the fuel the machinery burns. Break any part of that chain, and the whole thing breaks down in a way that simply cannot be fixed except by slowly building up the production chain again from scratch.

1130

Are you saying we couldn’t maintain current levels, or that we could progress? Because I’m okay staying where we are.

1131

Couldn’t maintain current levels.

1132

^ This.

Especially since we could do more to keep older people healthy (on average) and able to work, able to care for themselves, yet we don’t.

1133

There’s only one company on the planet that makes the advanced photolithography equipment needed by the latest chips: ASML. They’re a Dutch company with about 40,000 people.

So that’s it. That’s all the current population of Earth supports when it comes to the tip of the semiconductor tech stack: one company. They depend on a much larger set of companies to supply them with things like servo motors and photochemicals and such, who themselves depend on an even wider set of companies.

Every company involved has some minimum viable number of people. They are, mostly, knowledge companies. If you take some company making a critical component and cut it in half, you don’t get half the components. You get zero components, because there just aren’t enough people to support the process at all.

How many people do you really need to support the semiconductor industry? I don’t know and it’s impossible to say, except to point out again that they’re at the tip of the pyramid, and basically depend on the entire industrial economy to work.

If you only had a billion people, you could probably assign the jobs in a way to keep modern semiconductors. You’d just lose a lot of other stuff. It wouldn’t look like today’s economy.

If you only had a million people, you might be able to have some primitive semiconductors, but not the ones we enjoy today.

1134

Honestly kinda funny how you’re here talking about 10% reductions and Steve_MB is talking about global population going down to a few million. Maybe you should talk to each other.

A slow drop of 10% is fine. That’s not what’s going to happen if other countries follow SK’s lead.

1135

Not an important point but actually not currently true.

The U.S. agricultural trade balance was positive for nearly 60 years until 2019, when it shifted to a deficit. Despite record agricultural imports and exports in 2021–22, imports exceeded exports by $21 billion in 2023.

To some significant degree we do quite a bit in that regard. To use myself as an example. By the time my father was my age he was an ill man, impacts of diabetes and high cholesterol. And while nutrition choices were an obvious place to blame my cholesterol was still through the roof when 27 years ago I was thin eating healthy and training for a marathon. Placed on Lipitor and poof. HDL suddenly higher than LDL. Without that medication I’d have had a first heart attack by now. Without my regular steroid preventative inhaler I’d not be exercising regularly and suffering the impacts of that lack. I have a much better crack at a productive healthspan because of these medications. Many of our costly diseases of aging are related to obesity. As the GLP1 inhibitors get much cheaper, and they will, eventually, obesity will be much reduced and the harms of it as well. There are even hopeful signs in preventing new obesity in younger children.

Longer healthspan and less of a fraction of life on average spent enfeebled is good. That does not however come with assurance that these healthy elderly will choose to be productive contributors. And they will all be taking out from Social Security possibly a bit longer if that comes with longer lifespan as well.

Keeping us productive contributors and paying into the coffers into our 70s or maybe even later, is a cultural mindset shift.

1136

Why do you think the US fertility rate will drop to that of South Korea’s and stay there for 60 years? There are an awful lot of hypotheses there.

For one thing, a lot of my generation worried about overpopulation. If, somehow, the US starts to feel underpopulated, and the world looks to be improving, i suspect the fertility will increase all in its own.

Yes, if global fertility rates drop to 0.7 and stay there, all sorts of bad things will happen. It’s not clear that South Korea will maintain that low fertility rate, though. The latest figures i can find suggest it increased a bit in 2024.

1137

I didn’t say anything about the US. The numbers were purely fictitious and meant to illustrate the point. I care about what happens in the rest of the world, not just the US. Even if just a few countries evaporate due to low fertility rate, that’s still an enormous negative!

As I’ve said numerous times, a fertility rate slightly below replacement is fine, especially if augmented by immigration.

I focus on SK because they demonstrate that the lower limits for fertility rates are extremely low. The US and other countries should place a very high priority on not getting to that point, or anywhere close. SK is probably already doomed.

1138

IF!
There are nearly 200 nation in the world, you pick out one and well there’s the example we should use. Nonsense

The current world Birthrate is 2.27 births per woman.

South Korea has a unique set of issues-

The Necessary Paradigm Shift for South Korea’s Ultra-Low Fertility - Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.

Critics argue that these fertility policies have fallen short due to the lack of efficient leadership, a fragmented policy administration, and poor planning. A combination of institutional, structural, and cultural factors also contribute to South Korea’s ultra-low fertility, including labor market inequality and uncertainty, a family-unfriendly work culture, the high cost of raising children in a competitive educational system, and gender-essentialist family organization.

This is like saying- well the Titanic sank, lets not build any more ships.

Yep.

By dollars- not tonnages. We import luxury foods and export necessary foods-

The leading U.S. agricultural exports are grains and feeds, soybeans, livestock products, tree nuts, fruits, vegetables, and consumer-oriented food products. The leading U.S. agricultural imports are processed food and beverages, and tropical products.
The value of U.S. agricultural imports grew by 6 percent annually from 2014 to 2024, growing to a record $213 billion in 2024. In most years, at least half the growth was in horticultural products—a category including high-value products such as fruits, vegetables, alcoholic beverages, essential oils, tree nuts, and nursery stock. Growth in high-value agricultural imports has been driven by demand for year-round supply, changing consumer preferences, and a strong exchange rate.

In other words, the USA feeds itself and much more nations.

1139

Virtually every country is following the same pattern. If it can happen there, and the same patterns hold elsewhere, then it can happen here.
Imgur

I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Before you can fix a problem, you must recognize that there is in fact a problem.

A bunch of people in the thread have basically said “Great! We need a lower population!” without thinking for 5 seconds what other consequences that would have. And some people seem to be arguing “Well, hopefully it’ll just stop on its own” without any convincing argument for why it should.

All I’ve ever argued is that a rapid decline is a huge problem not just for humanity but the ecosystem as well, and that SK and a few others are going to face some extremely serious challenges, and so every country should be paying very close attention to what they do and how they got there so that they don’t face the same problems.

1140

This article came across the Washington Post this morning.

I don’t know why the preview isn’t showing.

Title: “Many women ‘just don’t want to’ have kids. These books don’t blame them.”

https://wapo.st/4ks8NHD

This is the money quote. It seems to me that if women “just don’t want to.” There;s no arguing with it.

Although some liberals have suggested that we might reverse the trend by offering women more material support, the preponderance of evidence suggests that resistance to parenthood is not economically motivated. A Pew Research Center study from July of last year revealed that 57 percent of American adults under 50 who do not want to have children “just don’t want to,” and that 44 percent “want to focus on other things.” Economic concerns were the fourth-most-cited reason to forgo children, mentioned by 36 percent of those surveyed. Would-be mothers were particularly adamant: They really “just don’t want to.” Sixty-four percent of the women in the study cited that as their primary reason, compared with 50 percent of men.