On this question of why efforts to turn around declining birthrates have failed: Depending on your politics, you might attribute the decline to different causes, not all of which are problems, and not all of which are solvable. Specifically, the political left in the US talks about the decline as a function of women's greater independence and economic power, which is not a problem to solve, unless... you are on the political right in the US, and you attribute declining birthrates to declining morals and emasculation. Neither of these points of view points to a solution.
Applying this to my own politics: I can't shake the impression that wealth concentration plays a huge role. That the demands of working to earn enough money to purchase increasingly unaffordable capital assets, especially homes, make having as many children as you want, at the age you would like to have them, or at any age, very challenging. As Kevin points out, paying someone $75,000 to have a baby isn't working. He suggests the value might be in the millions. That's an interesting thought.
I agree with financial situation playing a huge role. Also, with the constantly rising inequality and cost of living, how will your kid ever be able to afford buying a home? On top of that, the world overall feels a lot more insecure than 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Add in climate change and the non-zero probability risk of civilization actually collapsing.
Bill Burr summed it up nicely when talking about Musk: maybe people would want to have more kids if they didn't have to bring them to this f'ed up world.
In other words, might be better to focus on fixing those issues that cause people to lose their hope in the future instead of trying to address birth rates directly.
Amazing podcast / interview ! As usual, I admire your work, always spot on on the real issues we are facing and so thoroughly researched. Given the quality of your work, can I just say the audio quality is a bit rough… maybe you could ask someone to help you improve the audio ? Sorry, it is such a minor detail but I think your videos / podcasts will be more attractive as it is now hard to listen to you with this quality. People care less about the quality of the video but a lot of us listen to them.
Thank you again for your work , I always talk about your newsletter and your work around me and on social media , you rock!
Growth has been largely driven by population growth. Combining that with Kevins estimates that we will reach peak population in around 2040, what will happen? We are probably already there in for example Europe. So from an economic perspective we can already see what happens, stagnant economies, social polarisation, rise of extreme political parties, declining purchasing power etc. On the economic side it may also mean that Europe needs to export much of its production as it has not enough people to consume its products. Japan has already faced this problem and found a recipe in using its capital base to buy production capacity in other countries, and being an export led economy, from Japan and abroad. How long will that be accepted by other countries? Not long from what we can see with trade wars brewing. China is set on solving its declining population with robotic production. But still being export led, which is not popular in the West. So if population is not leading the growth it will be true competition the does, however likely with much less abundance to share. This is likely to lead to much more protection.
If an AI growth can generate an abundance that would be great, but very much remains to be seen. In the mean time brace for trade wars.
I find the idea of countries compete for inhabitant very intriguing. It reminds me of ideas presented in the Sovereign Individual, but with slight twist because of the population decline.
John B. Calhoun, in experiments at the Natl. Inst. of Mental Health, predicted this decline 70 years ago. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/1/2308Ramadams.pdf; "Behavioral norms and social roles that once held a society together now undermined it: violence became more
acute, withdrawal more severe. In other words, we’d go mad long before we’d starve; we’d kill one another long before hunger killed us."
I'm surprised that you don't discuss AI-human symbiosis and biocomputing more, Azeem. Your Sunday post just mentioned the Australian commercial wetware computer. With regenerative manufacturing, CRISPR, and other bioengineering, doesn't an evolution that merges AI, robotic, and human-animal biology seem almost inevitable?
There are an interesting statistics that track the number of kids women ideally want, and depending on where you look, it seems that that number is somewhere between 2.1 and 3. On or slightly above the replacement rate. This suggest, to me, that the reasons why population growth is slowing has more to do with cultural and social-economic factors, like the decline of marriage stability, decline in community coherence and decline in status (including remuneration) of in-family care and child raising work.
Our current society basically puts more value in people working in the monetized economy than in the unpaid economy. And raising a child, caring for elders and managing a household is hard work. Unpaid work, for most of us. So, I feel; or we put our money where our mouth is start paying people (in money and social status) to create a stabile child raising households and communities or should rethink the monetization of everything or we should accept the decline. This all said, I'm do not want to suggest that it should be woman who are supposed to do this. Far from it.
I'm just saying, we have created a monetized work sphere where social status is measured in money and child caring work and community building work falls outside of this sphere, so it's no wonder when those two are under extreme cultural and social-economic pressure.
Linking it to the development of the AI economy; it would be interesting to think about how we can curb this partly autonomous economy to make it so that child caring and community building is again valued in a real sense and that women (and men) can realize their ideal families.
On this question of why efforts to turn around declining birthrates have failed: Depending on your politics, you might attribute the decline to different causes, not all of which are problems, and not all of which are solvable. Specifically, the political left in the US talks about the decline as a function of women's greater independence and economic power, which is not a problem to solve, unless... you are on the political right in the US, and you attribute declining birthrates to declining morals and emasculation. Neither of these points of view points to a solution.
Applying this to my own politics: I can't shake the impression that wealth concentration plays a huge role. That the demands of working to earn enough money to purchase increasingly unaffordable capital assets, especially homes, make having as many children as you want, at the age you would like to have them, or at any age, very challenging. As Kevin points out, paying someone $75,000 to have a baby isn't working. He suggests the value might be in the millions. That's an interesting thought.
I agree with financial situation playing a huge role. Also, with the constantly rising inequality and cost of living, how will your kid ever be able to afford buying a home? On top of that, the world overall feels a lot more insecure than 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Add in climate change and the non-zero probability risk of civilization actually collapsing.
Bill Burr summed it up nicely when talking about Musk: maybe people would want to have more kids if they didn't have to bring them to this f'ed up world.
In other words, might be better to focus on fixing those issues that cause people to lose their hope in the future instead of trying to address birth rates directly.
Amazing podcast / interview ! As usual, I admire your work, always spot on on the real issues we are facing and so thoroughly researched. Given the quality of your work, can I just say the audio quality is a bit rough… maybe you could ask someone to help you improve the audio ? Sorry, it is such a minor detail but I think your videos / podcasts will be more attractive as it is now hard to listen to you with this quality. People care less about the quality of the video but a lot of us listen to them.
Thank you again for your work , I always talk about your newsletter and your work around me and on social media , you rock!
Growth has been largely driven by population growth. Combining that with Kevins estimates that we will reach peak population in around 2040, what will happen? We are probably already there in for example Europe. So from an economic perspective we can already see what happens, stagnant economies, social polarisation, rise of extreme political parties, declining purchasing power etc. On the economic side it may also mean that Europe needs to export much of its production as it has not enough people to consume its products. Japan has already faced this problem and found a recipe in using its capital base to buy production capacity in other countries, and being an export led economy, from Japan and abroad. How long will that be accepted by other countries? Not long from what we can see with trade wars brewing. China is set on solving its declining population with robotic production. But still being export led, which is not popular in the West. So if population is not leading the growth it will be true competition the does, however likely with much less abundance to share. This is likely to lead to much more protection.
If an AI growth can generate an abundance that would be great, but very much remains to be seen. In the mean time brace for trade wars.
I find the idea of countries compete for inhabitant very intriguing. It reminds me of ideas presented in the Sovereign Individual, but with slight twist because of the population decline.
John B. Calhoun, in experiments at the Natl. Inst. of Mental Health, predicted this decline 70 years ago. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/1/2308Ramadams.pdf; "Behavioral norms and social roles that once held a society together now undermined it: violence became more
acute, withdrawal more severe. In other words, we’d go mad long before we’d starve; we’d kill one another long before hunger killed us."
I'm surprised that you don't discuss AI-human symbiosis and biocomputing more, Azeem. Your Sunday post just mentioned the Australian commercial wetware computer. With regenerative manufacturing, CRISPR, and other bioengineering, doesn't an evolution that merges AI, robotic, and human-animal biology seem almost inevitable?
There are an interesting statistics that track the number of kids women ideally want, and depending on where you look, it seems that that number is somewhere between 2.1 and 3. On or slightly above the replacement rate. This suggest, to me, that the reasons why population growth is slowing has more to do with cultural and social-economic factors, like the decline of marriage stability, decline in community coherence and decline in status (including remuneration) of in-family care and child raising work.
Our current society basically puts more value in people working in the monetized economy than in the unpaid economy. And raising a child, caring for elders and managing a household is hard work. Unpaid work, for most of us. So, I feel; or we put our money where our mouth is start paying people (in money and social status) to create a stabile child raising households and communities or should rethink the monetization of everything or we should accept the decline. This all said, I'm do not want to suggest that it should be woman who are supposed to do this. Far from it.
I'm just saying, we have created a monetized work sphere where social status is measured in money and child caring work and community building work falls outside of this sphere, so it's no wonder when those two are under extreme cultural and social-economic pressure.
Linking it to the development of the AI economy; it would be interesting to think about how we can curb this partly autonomous economy to make it so that child caring and community building is again valued in a real sense and that women (and men) can realize their ideal families.