Ah. There were several links in DrDeth’s post. I was reading the dependency ratio one. Probably why I am missing the parts you object to! My bad.
Which one? I was citing the blog in my previous post, not the SciAm article. It said:
The reason for the hyped-up panic generally comes down to the overly simplistic ‘dependency ratio‘, which has several different forms but generally compares the number of people in the labour force against those who have retired from it. The idea here is that once the number of people no longer in the labour force exceeds the number of those in the labour force, the latter can no longer support the entirety of the former.
This simplistic 1:1 relationship essentially assumes that you need one person working to support one retired person. Errrh. Right. Let’s look at this in more detail.
But no one argues that there’s a hard 1:1 threshold like that. Obviously, this is all a matter of degree. The elderly can have a very luxurious retirement when there aren’t too many of them compared to the labor force. The degree of luxury goes down as that ratio changes.
ETA: Yeah, the second one.
Yes. Again my confusion. Agree with your critique about that. The better figure to focus on is the LFDR. Coupled with reasonable predictions for increased per capita productivity based on improvements in, new applications of, and adoption of technology already emerging.
As to superannuation - minimally the taxes paid as withdrawals are made and sales taxes paid as things bought are ongoing contributions to funding the system.
Yeah, you should give me the magic wand. You’d have six grandchildren already; you’d be complaining about how chaotic it was hosting everyone for the Passover meal.
But really, if you had a magic wand, why not set birth rates to replacement or just below in every country? You could still have immigration to America: it’s not that crowded, and the US had high immigration for some decades while it was near or at replacement fertility. In fact, if you had a magic wand, why not reduce birth rates further in poor and war torn nations, or those where climate change will be a problem? Fewer people would have to live in those conditions, and it would mean a smaller number of refugees in future. And you already said you don’t mind if some groups disappear.
As for Europe, it’s a very different situation to America. Pretty much everything Americans admire about Europe only exists because of its greater homogeneity: comprehensive welfare states; comparatively low levels of crime, disorder, and incarceration; pleasant urban centres. That’s the compensation for being much poorer than Americans, and it’s what we stand to lose. And because of those welfare states, there’s a much higher bar for immigrants (or natives) to contribute more than they take out. Because of this, low skilled immigrants (your huddled masses) just worsen the hole we are in. You need America’s libertarian economy (no employment rights, no benefits, low minimum wage) to take advantage of them.
And why would highly skilled immigrants come to Europe, when America is so very much richer that me and my husband are tempted to move there ourselves? Despite low birth rates, European countries still have rather high levels of emigration, and this brain drain isn’t helping productivity at all.
It does feel that way. We’re basically committing suicide as a civilisation because we’re too comfortable to bother having children.
So what lengths are you willing to go to “save” your civilization?
Trump is gonna be out of office long before any of that happens.
I disagree.
Europeans aren’t poorer than Americans, and they are less homogeneous. And the way Europe does things is cheaper, not more expensive.
Those are all just right wing talking points.
And he’ll just be replaced by some theocratic fascist who is if anything worse.
Or his side will lose the election.
Democracy is dead. Even if they bother holding elections, they’ll just declare themselves the “winners” and that will be that.
Moderating:
Hey, this is not a political thread. It’s a thread about fecundity. General discussion about growth and pollution are close enough to the topic, but electoral details of the US really aren’t.
Yep.
Where are your cites?
I gave solid cites that showed some decrease in birth rate is a Good thing. Show us a cite that says unrestrained population growth- hell- increased population growth is a good thing.
I’d like to run with this. Let’s start with the facts. Population is currently growing. It is projected to keep growing until the 2080s, at which point it peaks. So… it’s good that we’re thinking ahead. Way ahead.
According to projections by the UN cited in World in Data, the dependency ratio will then stabilize at something like 68%, below that which existed in 1954-1982. Still there are worries that we will lack the resources to take care of the elderly. I suspect that continued economic development -if it persists- will grow the potentially accessible productive labor force over the next 25-50 years.
Last year 56% of the world lives on less than $10 per day, in 1999 the figure was 76%. So that’s a 20 percentage point drop over 25 years, reflecting a massive expansion in the literate labor force. It’s plausible to anticipate a similar drop over the next 25 years, and possibly the 25 years after that.
The point: the rich world will be able to tap into an ever larger pool of sufficiently skilled workers over the next 50 years or so, possibly beyond. I agree that the we need to learn to calibrate population growth. But the threat isn’t imminent, provided low birth rate countries are willing to set aside their bigotry, encourage immigration, and treat new arrivals with dignity.
Hrm. Sounds unlikely. Ok, we’re fucked.
I think it would be interesting to look at the demographics of minimally productive labor force growth. The migration from peasantry to the formal labor force needs to be worked into the calculations.
Julian Simon is the go-to guy for that. I don’t think he’s fringe, but I do opine he is fringe-adjacent. Most experts are more concerned about global climactic change and excessive population, though the challenges faced with aging population pyramids are widely acknowledged. Paul Ehrlich has received a lot of well deserved brickbats, but the substance of them is properly directed at his sloppy modeling rather than a general concern about global ecosystem decline driven by greenhouse gases and exacerbated by growing population.
Why would I defend a claim that I never made?
Regardless, you aren’t going to get any cites from me except for raw data. I can make an argument on my own. Find a claim that I did make and I’ll be happy to argue it further.
You have asked to increase the birth rate. Which is- indeed-unrestrained population growth.
I see.
Honestly, at this point I can’t conceive of what you think I’m arguing at this point. Nor what process you’ve arrived at to conclude that “unrestrained population growth” follows from an increased birth rate.
Individual places like SK should increase their birth rate if they don’t want to evaporate. And the world as a whole should ideally figure out how to have a soft landing when it comes to globally decreasing rates. I’ve said repeatedly that a slow reduction is fine. Just not SK levels.
Honestly, I’m grateful to South Korea and Singapore for their experiment with very low birth rates. These moderate population countries give the rest of the world an empirical preview of their future challenges.
South Korea’s population has flattened. Italy’s is shrinking. Here’s a list of about 55 countries with shrinking populations. I’m curious about how this is developing. Also curious about shrinking population states like Illinois and West Virginia.
That is exactly what it is.
Like you point out, we are looking at a process that will play out over many decades. A sudden increase in birthrate would actually increase the dependency ratio until those babies make it into the workforce. But a change in attitude on the desirability of immigration can lead to intelligent immigration reform on a virtual dime, and very rapidly begin to alter the dependency ratio.
Hopefully this doesn’t cross into becoming political, but the United States has been more accepting of immigration before (albeit a preference for the “right sort” of immigrants, white European Christian …
but even accepting some of wrong ones too - be they Jews, Arabs, or just people darker than white.)
Over decades there may be realization again that we need immigration to thrive as a country.
Are you aware that it’s possible for a number to be between 0.68 and 2.1?
That’s a massively exaggerated take, unless you have a different view of who “we” is from the way I was interpreting you.
No, the societies of the US and UK, for example, are not committing “civilizational suicide” because “we’re too comfortable to bother having children”. (And I’m pretty sure that that wasn’t what Der_Trihs intended when he complained about our societies being on a downhill slide, for political rather than demographic reasons.)
Moreover, the blaming-and-shaming approach directed at non-parents (and, presumably, also at parents who have stopped at a below-replacement-level number of children) seems to me like a rather counterproductive, not to mention contradictory, perspective on family life. If, on average, humans who are able to live “comfortably” with freedom to make their own reproductive choices really don’t find parenthood sufficiently fulfilling to maintain a birthrate high enough to keep our species from literally going extinct, then that seems like a pretty powerful indictment of parenthood as not a worthwhile activity on an individual level. Maybe in that case we should go extinct and clear the field for other species in which offspring care isn’t so intolerably burdensome.
That’s pretty tongue-in-cheek, of course, because I don’t believe that as a species we are on track to going extinct, at least not through underpopulation.
And I don’t believe that “comfortableness” is the primary factor in declining birthrates, either; that’s just part of the rhetoric that parents often use to scold non-parents as being somehow lazy and irresponsible. Just as some non-parents irrationally think of parenthood as a selfish indulgence requiring the rest of society to help care for other people’s crotch spawn, some parents irrationally think of non-parenthood as a selfish indulgence expecting a free ride from society in old age.
The more humane and more rational way to think of both of those situations is that there are a whole lot of complex factors that influence people’s decisions and ability to choose parenthood or not. Since wealthy people seem to have more children on average than struggling middle-class people, I really don’t think that the deciding factor is potential parents’ “comfortableness” levels.