I deeply appreciate your standards for looking across societies, globally, when we propose causation stories for what’s going on. Thank you!
Meanwhile, having been born at a time of collective alarm at the carrying capacity of our planet, I find it utterly crazymaking to hear, simultaneously, that 1) developed countries are in critical need of more people to support capitalism’s baseline requirement of perpetual growth , 2) there are far too many people trying to get into, and find work inside, developed countries, and 3) we need to raise fertility on a planet that can’t handle more of us.
I’d love to hear a mind like yours taking this on.
Falling population growth is not a problem. One might think it is a symptom of something that IS a problem. And there are things that are good anyway -- immigration, higher saving for retirement, child allowance, lower fiscal deficits faster pc growth -- that might stem the fall.
1. Not "capitalism" "requires" "perpetual growth". But people like stuff (incl. services), entrepreneurs make a profit providing it. With less workers and less consumers there is less of a market, less production, there is less stuff and services. (While people do not drop dead at 65 but need ever more care.)
2. There are never far too many people coming to work. Surprising a commie believes Trump. And as the post tries to make clear: Soon, there will be no "overpopulated" countries with a qualified workforce. (No, we won't be rescued by Niger and Mali.)
3. Paul Ehrlich and many other misled Rome-clubbers claimed 2 generations ago, earth could not handle more of us. Was utterly wrong then. Is utterly wrong now. Ehrlich's prescriptions were murderous then, as Greta's are now.
You’ve bought a lie. The rich want to convince you that there is too many people and that you are the cause of climate change, when in reality they want more of the world to themselves. AI development needs 20% more energy output than we currently have. You can bet they will find the money and energy for that, all while telling you to consume less and stay in your overpriced home. And yes, that’s why they are betting on robots replacing you , so they don’t have to deal with the fallout of a population collapse.
Mercy. I didn’t need the strident baloney bath you offered. You didn’t read my statement: “I find it crazymaking to hear…” you don’t know what I think about these three statements that, held together, are hard to take.
You don’t know that I earned a PhD in matters including population biology and that science is rarely correct but rarely “lies”. You don’t know what misinformation I do and don’t subscribe to, and your stridency does not make you correct.
I would like Substack to be a place of intelligent AND thoughtful discourse. I ask you to tone it down just to the point where your words are interesting and part of a collective of thoughtfulness and decency. At least when you are addressing me directly.
🤣🤣 yes, mr elderqueer , we know you’re a radical liberal ideology shill. Your PHD doesn’t mean shit with the amount of indoctrination going on at the collegiate level.
I don't see how huge drops over the course of a decade can be anything but smartphones. Gender attitudes, levels of environmental toxins, etc. couldn't change fast enough (and simultaneously across countries, no less) to produce that outcome.
Wouldn't it be useful to have more disaggregated data, like a time series for "annual birth rates in among 24-year-old women" in each Nigerian state? That would allow you to identify natural experiments (different timing of introduction to smartphones, based on where the networks rolled out and when) which could test the hypothesis more rigorously.
I wonder how useful it is to speak of a "global collapse" when birthrates differ so much from nation to nation (there's the local variation you want theory to account for, I guess).
I mean, Italy and Nigeria have both seen declines in fertility, but Italy's (1.2 births per woman, below replacement rate of 2.1) has far different consequences than Nigeria's (4.38 per woman). Italy's median age is nearly 48. Nigeria's is about 18. So, in a bunch of African nations, birthrate decline is just a very different thing than it is in Asia or Europe. (According to at least one projection (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) Nigeria in 2100 will have a larger population than China.)
This suggests, as you imply, that a central problem for the rest of the century will be creating successful diverse societies in a time of mass migration from teeming nations to graying ones. A theory of how to do that would be very good to have. Especially if it was also a theory of how to make the achievement stick, as successful diverse societies have a way of suddenly not being so successful. (When I was a kid, then-Yugoslavia was held up as a model of inter-ethnic cooperation, intermarriage etc.)
Even if you exclude nations and regions with above replacement fertility rates (the African continent, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Arab World, Haiti, and Afghanistan) that's still a majority of the world with below replacement fertility. Even Indonesia is 2.1 right now and India, Vietnam & The Philippines are below 2.1.
Yes, it is for sure a global phenomenon. But the countries you mention, far above replacement, face different challenges than the majority of nations. (And most of those below replacement have not yet begun to actually shrink, ie, the problem isn't yet politically evident to all.) I didn't mean to suggest it's not global. Just that the problem has two facets.
I heard recently, Nigeria's birthrate numbers may be inflated. Nigeria gives out oil money dollars to different provinces based on their reported population and there's nobody overseeing the populations that the individual provinces are reporting. So there is always a huge incentive to lie"
personally as a woman living in the global south I apply a very simple rule : no rights ? no access to free, private no questions asked contraception, cervical screening, std tests, no protection against revenge porn etc. ? → 4B ! 4B.
1) infant mortality rates have collapsed. Because babies don’t die, families have few new babies.
2) People are living a lot longer. With better healthcare, nutrition and technology people are living longer. When family members don’t die, we don’t have as many kids to replace them.
3) In developed countries, we have cost disease socialism that spikes costs. Look at single-family zoning, which is basically population control that blocks new homes, raising rents, and making it harder for new families to get started. Some countries don’t have universal healthcare, which also makes it even more expensive for new families to get started.
If you believe that we have far more people on this planet than is ecologically sustainable, then falling fertility rates is an unmitigated good, regardless of slower growth in per capita GDP. We have plenty of wealth, the problem is distribution. How you frame this development is as important as doing careful research. I’m totally in agreement that there’s a lot of unfounded speculation.
Well-said. GDP (God Damn Profits) is NOT the highest good, certainly not higher than a livable planet! Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host, by the way.
I HATE it when recent fertility decline is blamed on women and feminism. Which rights did women acquire in 2015 that they didn't have before? It js definitely something else.
Careful of ageist assumptions based on past models of ageing.
The second billion of the world’s over-60s arriving by 2050 won’t age (or retire) like their predecessors. They may be powerful economic drivers - as women were over the last few decades.
As life expectancy rises across the globe (with the notable exception of the US/ UK), keep an eye on the older.
Might there be an evolutionary reason for longer lives, generationally-balanced demographic squares and the rise of AI?
And yes, agree that getting men and women reconnected is an essential priority. But skewing education female for decades hasn’t helped.
I think (1) and (2) are the result of the misdiagnosis to the problem and the subsequent authoritarian response we see everywhere in developed countries - in my opinion specifically the micro level. (3) is where the insight is and also the shadow no one really wants to address. Thanks for your hard work, you’ve opened my perspective to ideas I never could/would have considered previously!
If you find the Malthusian theory reasonably plausible then one could view the current fertility decline as a hopeful sign - i.e. that the current self-correcting demographic shift is relatively non-violent (that, of course, depends on what your definition of non-violence is) as opposed to what the Rev. Malthus saw as being the inevitable self-correcting mechanisms (war, famine, disease) and that humanity has learned to self-regulate its population in more peaceful ways than heretofore.
Is it really so bad? Exponential growth is not sustainable, though easy to manage at first (until it is too late and we need wars / civil wars to "regulate" the population). We'd better change our models and learn to live without growth.
Whatever one of those deep sounding quotes, never attribute to malice that which can sufficiently be explained by incompetence.
They didn't choose the toxoplasmosis life
the toxoplasmosis life chose them.
"The inability to naturally conceive is a common problem for many couples. Latent toxoplasmosis appears to be one of the causes of fertility disorders in humans. In a questionnaire study by Kaňková et al. [28], infected women reported that it took them significantly longer to conceive, to become pregnant at an older age, and experienced more fertility problems overall than uninfected women did. Toxoplasma-positive women are thus more likely to require artificial insemination than Toxoplasma-negative women. In fact, a higher prevalence of toxoplasmosis has been observed in infertile women than in healthy pregnant women [29,30], in infertile couples than in fertile ones [31], and in infertile men than in fertile ones [32]. Moreover, Toxoplasma-positive men had a higher level of anti-sperm antibodies than Toxoplasma-negative men did [31]. Hlaváčová et al. [33] found a significantly higher incidence of fertility problems in Toxoplasma-positive than in Toxoplasma-negative men. They also showed that latent toxoplasmosis negatively affects sperm count and motility.
Although the adverse effects of latent toxoplasmosis on human fertility and fertility problems related to depressive symptoms have been repeatedly observed, no study has ever tested the association between latent toxoplasmosis, fertility, and depression. The aim of this study is thus to analyze the effect of latent toxoplasmosis on depression in men and women in relation to their fertility.
Conclusions
Our results showed that the effect of toxoplasmosis on depression goes in the opposite direction in men and in fertile women. While toxoplasmosis seems to protect men from depression, it appears to increase the likelihood of depression in women."
Perhaps, we can see all this as a response to the growing population of the XX and XXI century. By the moment, we have been able to increase productivity (in consequence: wealth-being) even faster than the growing population. However, we are closer to the maximum people that we can sustain, and that's why natality goes down. If there is an important % of old people, that means than in the future less children will born. So, the maximum that we are getting closer will be followed by an important decrease. And that decrease will provoke a "fight for the resources", because different States want to maintain their privileged life style at the same time that others want to achieved. In other words: by the moment, there is not enough fossils and minerals for a middle-class average life of an statistic (and because of it: non-existent) European guy. This natality crisis is a mechanism of demographic regulation.
If we think on the resources that our modern world is based on, it is plausible to think that is impossible to give the average style-life of a Wellfare State citizen. That's why, a decrease it is a way to undermine demographic pressure (always relative to life style x). However, it is probably that the competition between States increase (and, in many ways, for the same reasons restrict on endogenous factors of each State).
In the individual reasons of decrease, I share with you the cost/benefits reason of having children, wonderfully exposed by Marvin Harris decades ago. A child "returned" a lot years ago (working fields, or little business, or taking care of domestic jobs or brothers, or start working at 14 and contributing to the family...) while the "costs" where minor than the benefits. In our days, ¿which is the return of children (far away from affective reasons)? We can just mention the cares in old ages, but with the State and private companies taking care of some of this functions (just in rich countries, with bad conditions (it is sad to visit a public residence here in Spain) and not for everyone), this "motivation" also disappears. Today, having a child has enormous costs and a few benefits. That's why people don't have children, and not because life is expensive.
PD: Sorry for my English, I am not used to. And, of course, i reject any reductionism; but I think this points are main factors.
The whole fiscal thing is of course a socially constructed fiction. In a Monetarily Sovereign economy, in which the government issues it's own currencies, there is by definition infinite money, via a few clicks of a computer keyboard. And before anyone cries "inflation!" keep in mind that aging and shrinking populations tend to be more deflationary than inflationary, so printing more money would be RE-flationary.
I deeply appreciate your standards for looking across societies, globally, when we propose causation stories for what’s going on. Thank you!
Meanwhile, having been born at a time of collective alarm at the carrying capacity of our planet, I find it utterly crazymaking to hear, simultaneously, that 1) developed countries are in critical need of more people to support capitalism’s baseline requirement of perpetual growth , 2) there are far too many people trying to get into, and find work inside, developed countries, and 3) we need to raise fertility on a planet that can’t handle more of us.
I’d love to hear a mind like yours taking this on.
"Carrying capacity" was as crazy a concept then.
Falling population growth is not a problem. One might think it is a symptom of something that IS a problem. And there are things that are good anyway -- immigration, higher saving for retirement, child allowance, lower fiscal deficits faster pc growth -- that might stem the fall.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/population-fear-of-falling
1. Not "capitalism" "requires" "perpetual growth". But people like stuff (incl. services), entrepreneurs make a profit providing it. With less workers and less consumers there is less of a market, less production, there is less stuff and services. (While people do not drop dead at 65 but need ever more care.)
2. There are never far too many people coming to work. Surprising a commie believes Trump. And as the post tries to make clear: Soon, there will be no "overpopulated" countries with a qualified workforce. (No, we won't be rescued by Niger and Mali.)
3. Paul Ehrlich and many other misled Rome-clubbers claimed 2 generations ago, earth could not handle more of us. Was utterly wrong then. Is utterly wrong now. Ehrlich's prescriptions were murderous then, as Greta's are now.
I hope, this blog will not care to do 101 lessons. There are blogs for beginners. Even PhDs raised as watermelons. https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/watermelons
Yikes, Mark. You sure do know a lot!
I appreciate the sarcasm. Not staying stuck in misconceptions is even better. Try.
You’ve bought a lie. The rich want to convince you that there is too many people and that you are the cause of climate change, when in reality they want more of the world to themselves. AI development needs 20% more energy output than we currently have. You can bet they will find the money and energy for that, all while telling you to consume less and stay in your overpriced home. And yes, that’s why they are betting on robots replacing you , so they don’t have to deal with the fallout of a population collapse.
Mercy. I didn’t need the strident baloney bath you offered. You didn’t read my statement: “I find it crazymaking to hear…” you don’t know what I think about these three statements that, held together, are hard to take.
You don’t know that I earned a PhD in matters including population biology and that science is rarely correct but rarely “lies”. You don’t know what misinformation I do and don’t subscribe to, and your stridency does not make you correct.
I would like Substack to be a place of intelligent AND thoughtful discourse. I ask you to tone it down just to the point where your words are interesting and part of a collective of thoughtfulness and decency. At least when you are addressing me directly.
🤣🤣 yes, mr elderqueer , we know you’re a radical liberal ideology shill. Your PHD doesn’t mean shit with the amount of indoctrination going on at the collegiate level.
Both can be true at the same time.
I don't see how huge drops over the course of a decade can be anything but smartphones. Gender attitudes, levels of environmental toxins, etc. couldn't change fast enough (and simultaneously across countries, no less) to produce that outcome.
Wouldn't it be useful to have more disaggregated data, like a time series for "annual birth rates in among 24-year-old women" in each Nigerian state? That would allow you to identify natural experiments (different timing of introduction to smartphones, based on where the networks rolled out and when) which could test the hypothesis more rigorously.
I wonder how useful it is to speak of a "global collapse" when birthrates differ so much from nation to nation (there's the local variation you want theory to account for, I guess).
I mean, Italy and Nigeria have both seen declines in fertility, but Italy's (1.2 births per woman, below replacement rate of 2.1) has far different consequences than Nigeria's (4.38 per woman). Italy's median age is nearly 48. Nigeria's is about 18. So, in a bunch of African nations, birthrate decline is just a very different thing than it is in Asia or Europe. (According to at least one projection (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) Nigeria in 2100 will have a larger population than China.)
This suggests, as you imply, that a central problem for the rest of the century will be creating successful diverse societies in a time of mass migration from teeming nations to graying ones. A theory of how to do that would be very good to have. Especially if it was also a theory of how to make the achievement stick, as successful diverse societies have a way of suddenly not being so successful. (When I was a kid, then-Yugoslavia was held up as a model of inter-ethnic cooperation, intermarriage etc.)
Even if you exclude nations and regions with above replacement fertility rates (the African continent, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Arab World, Haiti, and Afghanistan) that's still a majority of the world with below replacement fertility. Even Indonesia is 2.1 right now and India, Vietnam & The Philippines are below 2.1.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un
Yes, it is for sure a global phenomenon. But the countries you mention, far above replacement, face different challenges than the majority of nations. (And most of those below replacement have not yet begun to actually shrink, ie, the problem isn't yet politically evident to all.) I didn't mean to suggest it's not global. Just that the problem has two facets.
I heard recently, Nigeria's birthrate numbers may be inflated. Nigeria gives out oil money dollars to different provinces based on their reported population and there's nobody overseeing the populations that the individual provinces are reporting. So there is always a huge incentive to lie"
personally as a woman living in the global south I apply a very simple rule : no rights ? no access to free, private no questions asked contraception, cervical screening, std tests, no protection against revenge porn etc. ? → 4B ! 4B.
1) infant mortality rates have collapsed. Because babies don’t die, families have few new babies.
2) People are living a lot longer. With better healthcare, nutrition and technology people are living longer. When family members don’t die, we don’t have as many kids to replace them.
3) In developed countries, we have cost disease socialism that spikes costs. Look at single-family zoning, which is basically population control that blocks new homes, raising rents, and making it harder for new families to get started. Some countries don’t have universal healthcare, which also makes it even more expensive for new families to get started.
If you believe that we have far more people on this planet than is ecologically sustainable, then falling fertility rates is an unmitigated good, regardless of slower growth in per capita GDP. We have plenty of wealth, the problem is distribution. How you frame this development is as important as doing careful research. I’m totally in agreement that there’s a lot of unfounded speculation.
Well-said. GDP (God Damn Profits) is NOT the highest good, certainly not higher than a livable planet! Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host, by the way.
I HATE it when recent fertility decline is blamed on women and feminism. Which rights did women acquire in 2015 that they didn't have before? It js definitely something else.
Pollution is all-pervasive. It would be important to know the effect of pollution on such aspects as sperm viability and other pollution effects.
It boils down to "do more research"
I don't know, I'm too busy having kids
Careful of ageist assumptions based on past models of ageing.
The second billion of the world’s over-60s arriving by 2050 won’t age (or retire) like their predecessors. They may be powerful economic drivers - as women were over the last few decades.
As life expectancy rises across the globe (with the notable exception of the US/ UK), keep an eye on the older.
Might there be an evolutionary reason for longer lives, generationally-balanced demographic squares and the rise of AI?
And yes, agree that getting men and women reconnected is an essential priority. But skewing education female for decades hasn’t helped.
I think (1) and (2) are the result of the misdiagnosis to the problem and the subsequent authoritarian response we see everywhere in developed countries - in my opinion specifically the micro level. (3) is where the insight is and also the shadow no one really wants to address. Thanks for your hard work, you’ve opened my perspective to ideas I never could/would have considered previously!
If you find the Malthusian theory reasonably plausible then one could view the current fertility decline as a hopeful sign - i.e. that the current self-correcting demographic shift is relatively non-violent (that, of course, depends on what your definition of non-violence is) as opposed to what the Rev. Malthus saw as being the inevitable self-correcting mechanisms (war, famine, disease) and that humanity has learned to self-regulate its population in more peaceful ways than heretofore.
Is it really so bad? Exponential growth is not sustainable, though easy to manage at first (until it is too late and we need wars / civil wars to "regulate" the population). We'd better change our models and learn to live without growth.
Whatever one of those deep sounding quotes, never attribute to malice that which can sufficiently be explained by incompetence.
They didn't choose the toxoplasmosis life
the toxoplasmosis life chose them.
"The inability to naturally conceive is a common problem for many couples. Latent toxoplasmosis appears to be one of the causes of fertility disorders in humans. In a questionnaire study by Kaňková et al. [28], infected women reported that it took them significantly longer to conceive, to become pregnant at an older age, and experienced more fertility problems overall than uninfected women did. Toxoplasma-positive women are thus more likely to require artificial insemination than Toxoplasma-negative women. In fact, a higher prevalence of toxoplasmosis has been observed in infertile women than in healthy pregnant women [29,30], in infertile couples than in fertile ones [31], and in infertile men than in fertile ones [32]. Moreover, Toxoplasma-positive men had a higher level of anti-sperm antibodies than Toxoplasma-negative men did [31]. Hlaváčová et al. [33] found a significantly higher incidence of fertility problems in Toxoplasma-positive than in Toxoplasma-negative men. They also showed that latent toxoplasmosis negatively affects sperm count and motility.
Although the adverse effects of latent toxoplasmosis on human fertility and fertility problems related to depressive symptoms have been repeatedly observed, no study has ever tested the association between latent toxoplasmosis, fertility, and depression. The aim of this study is thus to analyze the effect of latent toxoplasmosis on depression in men and women in relation to their fertility.
Conclusions
Our results showed that the effect of toxoplasmosis on depression goes in the opposite direction in men and in fertile women. While toxoplasmosis seems to protect men from depression, it appears to increase the likelihood of depression in women."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8399658/#:~:text=%5B28%5D%2C%20infected%20women%20reported,in%20relation%20to%20their%20fertility.
Perhaps, we can see all this as a response to the growing population of the XX and XXI century. By the moment, we have been able to increase productivity (in consequence: wealth-being) even faster than the growing population. However, we are closer to the maximum people that we can sustain, and that's why natality goes down. If there is an important % of old people, that means than in the future less children will born. So, the maximum that we are getting closer will be followed by an important decrease. And that decrease will provoke a "fight for the resources", because different States want to maintain their privileged life style at the same time that others want to achieved. In other words: by the moment, there is not enough fossils and minerals for a middle-class average life of an statistic (and because of it: non-existent) European guy. This natality crisis is a mechanism of demographic regulation.
If we think on the resources that our modern world is based on, it is plausible to think that is impossible to give the average style-life of a Wellfare State citizen. That's why, a decrease it is a way to undermine demographic pressure (always relative to life style x). However, it is probably that the competition between States increase (and, in many ways, for the same reasons restrict on endogenous factors of each State).
In the individual reasons of decrease, I share with you the cost/benefits reason of having children, wonderfully exposed by Marvin Harris decades ago. A child "returned" a lot years ago (working fields, or little business, or taking care of domestic jobs or brothers, or start working at 14 and contributing to the family...) while the "costs" where minor than the benefits. In our days, ¿which is the return of children (far away from affective reasons)? We can just mention the cares in old ages, but with the State and private companies taking care of some of this functions (just in rich countries, with bad conditions (it is sad to visit a public residence here in Spain) and not for everyone), this "motivation" also disappears. Today, having a child has enormous costs and a few benefits. That's why people don't have children, and not because life is expensive.
PD: Sorry for my English, I am not used to. And, of course, i reject any reductionism; but I think this points are main factors.
The whole fiscal thing is of course a socially constructed fiction. In a Monetarily Sovereign economy, in which the government issues it's own currencies, there is by definition infinite money, via a few clicks of a computer keyboard. And before anyone cries "inflation!" keep in mind that aging and shrinking populations tend to be more deflationary than inflationary, so printing more money would be RE-flationary.