This is well meaning but ridiculous. The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita. More births are decidedly unhelpful. This weird effect where wealth reduces birth rate is a fantastic and unexpected reprieve that is probably not going to be permanent but there is no call to try and engineer its reversal. Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration. Let the planet drop down to 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty.
As far as I can see there isn't enough for everyone to do now anyway, even before AI really comes into its own.
> The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita.
Aside from fossil fuels, no, this is not the biggest problem. And for fossil fuels it's more a problem of lack of disposal resource for the CO2, not the fossil fuels themselves.
> Let the planet drop down to 1-2 billion people who all live a long way from poverty.
?
The industrial revolution increased productivity x100 and poverty still exists. We could materially solve it right now, easily. It's designed to be like that
The share of the world population in extreme poverty has gone down by about 80% since 1960. And the number of people in extreme poverty has gone down by about 2/3 since 1970.
It's getting better. Not as fast as it could or should, but it's getting better!!
Is it truly getting better, though, when the engine of improvement depends on ecological overshoot? We cannot sustain this; we're not even trying.
A gambler living the high life in Vegas, all paid for by opening one new credit card after another, would undoubtedly tell you that his life is getting better, too.
Well no, no we can't. That has been one of the issues that comes up every time someone does a quick check of what it would take for everyone to live even an average North American lifestyle, let alone something considered very comfortable by a US standard.
We don't have the coal, we don't have the oil, we don't have the copper, the steel, the yadda yadda. Earth overshoot day was apparently last month. Less births is almost literally the only humane way I can think of to improve on that situation. That or cheap energy; the situation is hopeful on that front but we don't need to purposefully goose the birth rate since maybe something will go wrong with plan A.
We have the steel, there is no way we run out of it, we could wrap the entire earth in steel coating and still not run out, and that is just what we have easily available.
There’s an inhuman way as well: the US, faced with declining standard of living, decides to use the fact that it has 12 super aircraft carriers and the 1, 2, 4, and 6th largest air forces - to ensure that standard of living stays where it is.
It's not designed like that. If there were no poverty in the world, GDP would be much higher and opportunities for trade much bigger - but how to get there is anyone's guess.
Nope, GDP is a completely outdated and next to useless metric, as any metric is when it becomes a target instead of a measurement. Some countries include illegal prostitution and illegal drug traffic in their GDP for exemple.
GDP was an OK metric in a post war industrial world, not in whatever we could call what we're dealing with since the 90s, and even more since most of our "production" are services, GDP was just not meant to deal with that, not in any way that is meaningful to us in this discussion (and on top of that it is much better at measuring quantities than qualities)
Depends on definiton of poverty. In many places, it has moved from living in objectively deprived conditions, to just being in the bottom centiles of population.
People dying of hunger, people not having clean water, people dying because the $5 antibiotic shot isn't available in their country, &c.
I don't care about relative poverty here, aka poverty threshold, which is by definition a moving threshold. For exemple in France the poverty threshold is defined as 60% of the median income, it doesn't tell you much about the "real" poverty
That's "poverty" as in "poverty threshold", that's not the only definition of the word.
You're talking about "I can't buy the brand new iphone max pro" poverty while we have the "I will lose my hands to leprosy because the 10$ antibiotics were too expensive" poverty
> The single biggest problem we face as a species is dropping resource availability per capita.
People keep saying this, but it’s been proven wrong over and over again since the 19th century. Malthus was wrong.
> This weird effect where wealth reduces birth rate is a fantastic and unexpected reprieve that is probably not going to be permanent but there is no call to try and engineer its reversal.
It’s not “nature.” It’s the result of anti-natalist eugenics ideology created by mainline Protestants in the 20th century in response to a moral panic about rising Catholic and black populations. They exported that ideology around the world through NGOs in the form of population control ideology. (My dad started his career at a Planned Parenthood affiliate in Bangladesh figuring out how to have less Bangladeshis. Planned Parenthood, of course, was started by Margaret Sanger, an Episcopalian and eugenicist.) East Asian countries that bought that ideology are now desperately trying to reverse the effects.
> Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration.
You can’t maintain a developed society with mass immigration. Sweden and Denmark have already reverse course on immigration and I expect the rest of Western Europe will follow.
1) I instinctively agree with 'roenxi', but I'd also agree that I don't have a solid basis for this belief. Could you expand on your claim that Malthus was wrong, as opposed to just too early in his prediction?
2) Have even lawyers like you dropped the 'fewer' vs 'less' distinction? I would have thought that you were old and conservative enough that 'less Bangladeshis' would be to grating to write. :)
Malthusians repeatedly fail to account for technological advancement. There's numerous studies estimating the carrying capacity of earth at above 10-20 billion (figures we likely will never reach): https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_C... (see p. 3).
When my dad was born in 1951, Bangladesh had a population of 38 million. People already thought it was full. Now, it has a population of 171 million. At the same time, infant mortality decreased by 7/8ths, so it is now lower in Bangladesh than it was in the U.S. in the 1960s. The country is now self-sufficient in the production of rice, fish, and vegetables. And Bangladesh hasn't even begun to maximize technology. The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, despite being 1/3 the size of Bangladesh (which itself is only a bit bigger than Virginia): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/net....
Regarding "fewer" versus "lesser": I'm usually pretty pedantic about that, but I think my brain fed me "lesser" to convey, in the context of that sentence, how population control advocates tend to view Asians as an undifferentiated mass.
But the majority [0] of studies on p. 3 suggest the carrying capacity is 8 billion or less. And I suspect that if we dig most of those studies aren't anticipating everyone lives with an overwhelming abundance of material comfort. We've already got more people on the globe than we know what to do with.
My point is that higher ceilings are plausible given certain assumptions. And I expect technological improvement will make those more aggressive assumptions into realistic and likely ones.
Scarcity arguments have always been the domain of fear mongers. A much more concrete problem is the environmental impact of resource availability, the opposite of what you are saying. As the world gets richer, we will succeed at providing material wealth to the growing population... But at what cost?
It is desirable to limit population growth nonetheless, and I think this will happen naturally, although possibly not soon enough.
I don't have any magic bullet for reducing population growth; helping the poor get wealthier and more educated faster should help bring birth rates to just below the 2.1 children per couple (replacement rate) and get us to a soft landing.
> Let nature take its course and adjust for any population problems with immigration
This directly leads to political instability and lowered wages for the local population, and is decidedly not helpful.
Why in the world should we engineer a society that is not self replicating, and burden our children with lower wages, just to save big businesses (who are the only people who thrive when importing labor).
I would argue the parenting is of much greater value than the birth itself. In general, the better the parenting, the greater the net value of the child to society.
> We conclude that the US government should be willing to pay up to $290,000, overall, to each parent who gives birth.
This is a weirdly short-sighted suggestion after all that analysis. Getting paid to have children can easily cause the value metric per child to plummet; not to mention the probable suffering caused to the children whose parents might try to abuse it.
If you want to increase births, things like subsidizing daycare and after-care and taking steps to ensure the quality of care are helpful. Making the cost of having children lower indirectly is much less likely to be abused.
Additionally, if you want to increase the value of children to society, making teaching a more appealing profession (i.e. paying more) and taking steps to ensure the quality of teachers are helpful.
Exactly. If the US is going to pay to incentivize something, let's not incentivize merely "pumping out kids." Hold the payment until the kid is 21, and only pay the parent(s) if he or she turns out to be an employed non-imprisoned, productive member of society.
It's really not parenting. A child's future potential is predominantly determined by genetics and environment. Parenting is third place. This is actually backed up by research.
Making babies is easy, raising them into productive members of society is hard. Unless the government can ensure the latter, incentivizing the former is only going to lead to disaster.
Western civilization was built on people a lot less educated than the ones we have today having babies! The generation that raised the Apollo astronauts and scientists had less than 50% of the population having high school diplomas.
This is why the "We will bring in a billion immigrants" strategy is going to fail. You don't need a billion unskilled laborers, you need a hundred million people who can take part in an advanced economy.
> This is why the "We will bring in a billion immigrants" strategy is going to fail.
That strategy is going to fail from simple math. Birthrates are dropping everywhere, and IIRC world fertility is at replacement or maybe even a little bit below it today. Immigrants have be born somewhere, and if that policy works at all, it will only amount to exporting the problem to places even less equipped to deal with it.
Do liberals really want to do what it takes to implement the immigration strategy (e.g. hold down Africa and keep it really poor, so its birthrates remain high and Western countries [and China, and India!] can raid it for population forever)?
Correct. What makes western societies work is the way children are socialized. You can’t outsource the socialization process to developing countries and import the adults.
Most of my adult family members immigrated to the U.S./Canada/Australia as adults. They are still Bangladeshis. If you imported 50 million of them, and allowed them to vote and participate in civic institutions, you would turn Canada or Australia into Bangladesh.
Perhaps it's even more basic nature. Everything alive tries to stay alive and get better, at the expense of anything else, including other living creatures.
Your statement seems to me to assume that our current society discovers the geniuses and transports them magically to caltech, princeton or wherever.
I would guess that many are actually making a living fixing tv's in a nairobi slum, or conjuring their own pantheon in a south american jungle, etc, etc.
>We conclude that the US government should be willing to pay up to $290,000, overall, to each parent who gives birth. This is a result of our model that shows that any new child born, that wouldn’t otherwise have been born without the subsidy, has a $1.03mn value to the US. In practice, suggestions for additional child tax credits from across the aisle should be implemented, and perhaps even greatly increased.
I can totally see this getting exploited. Yes, you'll get some more well educated, mentally sane people to have more kids. For sure. But I think you'll get a ton more kids from people who are at the bottom of society such as criminals. If the kids born aren't raised well, they could be a net negative to society rather than a net $1.03m to the economy.
I see it the same way, you could maybe make the argument to give money depending on reaching certain educational milestones. But just handing over money is really prone to abuse by anyone that doesn't have a conscience.
I have a different, albeit probably more cynical take on birth rates. As soon as machines reach feature parity with humans population size will turn into a liability and stop being an asset. And once again the west is ahead of the curve, with low population size and birth rates below 2.1. Once all physical labor is done by machines comparative advantages that have allowed developing countries to catch up will stop working. Instead comparative advantages will shift to countries with cheap resources and most importantly lots of robots and highly integrated industries. Like most technological developments they will ultimately benefit everyone in absolute terms - but will relatively speaking make disparities worse: Ie. the low population, high resources countries (ie. the North) will get even richer, the population rich south will stay poor in comparison.
Are you sure about the physical labor part? Because I'm yet to see a machine make fruit pickers, plumbers, construction workers, oil & gas workers, landscapers, or caregivers even remotely not viable anymore in the workplace. Meanwhile I'm seeing machines put various graphic designers out of jobs right now.
Who's jobs do you think the companies will go after first in the race to replace expensive labor with cheaper automation? The minimum wage burger flippers or migrant fruit pickers barely paid 10$/hour who gets no vacation and sick leave, or, the web developer/graphic designers paid $60+/hour who gets healthcare, paid time off, free meals and massages at work?
All physical labour being done by machine is a bit of a pipe dream for now.
What is an actual reality is that more and more physical work is actually being completed by fewer and fewer people.
In my lifetime I've seen first hand, since the 1970s, mining and agriculture expand production dramatically with smaller work forces being required through the multiplying magic of SBFM (Seriously Big Flippin' Machines) - Haulpacks, Tractors, Ships, Trucking, Trains, have grown is size; blast patterns for fracturing rock have increased their field sizes, continuous conveyors moving 100s of tonnes per hour have multiplied in parallel.
As for fruit picking, maybe look at orchard automation - there are many examples of tight geometric spacings for trees that are robo-mowed to supress weeds and harvested by laying down ground sheets and using hydralic tree shakers to bring down and gather up fruit, etc.
Not that I agree or disagree but the market will be different when it is not serving humans anymore.
The companies go after the jobs that are culturally hip to go after. I initially wrote something here trying to describe which jobs should really be automated but it was so vague I now think we are clueless until we try.
You could [say] hardcode the asshole employee manager and he/it would no doubt be worse than the human asshole in more aspects than one but he/it would also have many advantages that we cant pretend to enumerate without doing the experiment.
Who is to say we cant feed the world if we build enough autonomous chicken farm guard bots with high speed solar powered egg drones?
Who is to say what a 60/hour web dev can do with the help of some robots?
Work that can be done in front of a computer screen will obviously be replaced first, your examples are the jobs that I consider the last ones to be taken over by machines. And that's when my described scenario would take place - not before.
I don’t think we’re anywhere near the level of general robotics and intelligence that would obsolete human labor.
None of the most labor intensive industries have been able to fully automate, agriculture, mining, construction, healthcare, none are close to taking humans out of the loop.
Not only does the technology need to exist, it needs to be cheaper to develop and operate than the low income human it replaces.
Many countries are starting to see a critical lack of farmers, fishermen, hunters, and other people working in agriculture. Healthcare is also starting to suffer.
The robot automation will happen, probably either in our or the next generation's lifetimes, because there just aren't enough workers either due to lack of will (poor pay) or lack of literal humans.
I don’t believe that necessity will dictate our ability to create these technologies, the challenges are significant. Capitalism adjusting for reduced supply and greater demand by increasing pay is something more plausible as it has proven to work constantly.
> Birth rates are near or below replacement in all but the world’s poorest countries
As "Too many of the wrong kind of people are being born. How can we get more of the right kind?"
The entire underlying premise of the article is that the population should continue to grow forever or human progress is doomed. But that's not proven. And even if it were, I don't like "eugenics, but for nationalities instead of genetics" as the answer.
It is hard not to consider that possibility. But it should be easy not to read it that way - i.e. to give the benefit of the doubt that people can consider this a problem without being evil.
I don't consider their fundamental premise sound, that if the poor countries are fecund and the rich countries are not, that it will automatically lead to the end of worldwide technological innovation.
As I see things, it's a fact that, 1.) Immigration exists and is good, and 2.) it doesn't take very many years of education to turn someone from a disadvantaged background into a scientifically savvy modern person. If the author of this article merely forgot that, then that's quite an oversight. But you're right, it was uncharitable of me to assume he didn't forget, and actually thinks that either 1) or 2) are false. So I retract my cynicism and replace it with constructive criticism.
It's not about "kind" it's about wealth. Migrants coming to the west have vastly inferior fertility as their peers who stayed in their home country
I see how your take fits in the current "polarise everything" craze but the bigger issue imho is that our modern way of life is actively destroying itself, consumerism is toxic to itself
Don't think of it as a craze. Think of it more like, America just had a president that referred to many poor countries as "shitholes" and tried to block immigration from them. And as someone who has people they care deeply about who are immigrants from those countries, I have an increased sensitivity to certain dogwhistles which *absolutely* are being blown by some people. If I accidentally hear that dog whistle where the person only meant to discuss wealth, I hope you can understand why.
There are countless (sane) ways for governments to spend $290k to earn $1M back, like funding some promising research, job training programs, building infrastructure, etc.
As far as I can see there isn't enough for everyone to do now anyway, even before AI really comes into its own.
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