Consider, you get to collect Social Security and Medicare regardless of how many children you had, even though these are pay as you go systems that inevitably have to be paid for by the next generation.*
A proper system would make non-breeders pay higher taxes and transfer the money to breeders, to internalize the externalities. This would have to be MUCH larger than has ever been tried before (hundreds of thousands of dollars in value per kid). All previous attempts at paying breeders have been incredibly wimpy (like 1% of overall child cost, no wonder it doesn't work).
It would simultaneously be expensive and not expensive when you run the math. It's within our capabilities.
Assistance should be cash based, not subsidies for daycare or the like (most people who have 3+ kids would prefer to be SAHM, daycare isn't useful for them).
Also, school vouchers is a completely cost free way to increase value to parenting.
You could slant the subsidies towards higher earners and married couples while giving everyone a slice of the pie, to keep up eugenics.
I suspect this would solve the problem if implemented. The issue is that it lowers economic growth in the short term (those "assets" don't start contributing for 20+ years) and it doesn't appeal to the median voter (55+ and not giving a shit about other peoples kids).
*Even if not pay as you go it doesn't change much because someone actually has to provide the services in your retirement in exchange for assets, so if there is no younger generation your asset is worthless.
You don't seem to factor in the fact that Africans don't (want to) stay in Africa. They're constantly migrating and more would readily do so if the barriers are lowered. Nations whose populations are depleting only have to open their borders to burgeoning and restless Africans. Population transfer is not new and can be carried out on a grand scale if westernized society's population becomes too depleted for survival.
Africans are indeed self-colonizing through moving to the West. The question his whether the surplus populations of low-tech societies, African and other, will be able and willing to uphold high-tech societies.
I believe the perceived culture and values of the receiving nations would self-select for those Africans who are capable of and "willing to uphold high-tech societies".
It does. At least some Western countries, like the US and the UK, tend to attract people who want to transit from the Third World to First World. (Countries like Sweden, with high wages and high unemployment benefits, tend more to attract people who want to keep their culture and get paid for it).
But those people who are willing and capable to change culture are probably a finite resource. Those who transit to high-tech society have few children themselves. That way, there is an ongoing evolution where people who can resist being assimilated in high-tech societies are selected for.
One thing to track down is an offhand comment I read in one of Gregory Clarke's books: In Britain before 1850 people were typically downwardly-mobile, the rich had more (surviving) children than the poor. But after 1850, the reverse was true. 1850 in Britain is recent enough it should be possible to discern the detailed dynamic of this change, which should make it easier to predict the future of these trends.
People being OK with children being downwardly mobile is important. I think a big part of that is if one believes that a child that has less SES will still have good life. If you think life is terrible just one rung down you are going to be paranoid about it.
Excellent article. My 2 cents: I do not believe the fertility problem is a problem of technology per se. It's a problem of lack of religion and some(most?) religions are more or less anti-technology. But not all and it doesn't have to be that way. So the solution of fixing the Western civilization and white race must be some kind of new religion, compatible with the technology advancement. For example, Buddhism has never interfered with technological advancement. But in any case, the elephant in the room is simple - Western civilization with its genetic carrier white people - are facing a grave danger. We are more than capable to sustain ourselves even with shrinking population, but the current political situation (Marxism) with the open borders, weak state and complete inability to defend ourselves in the face of groups that openly hate us, is making the future looks very very doomed.
This seems worth taking seriously by those of us in the technologically advanced world. But the elephant in the room is that discussing it is easy labelled as racist. Thanks for consistently being one of the most thoughtful bloggers on here.
I think we'll get a lot of "technology leapfrogging" as has been written about. Societies like rural Africa, that didn't have telephone landlines, skipped over that phase and into cell phone use. Areas with bad electricity infrastructure (dependent on the state) are increasingly using solar and becoming more energy independent. Technology creation, like that of auto manufacturing and software engineering is leaving the US for less expensive areas like Mexico and India. Maybe in the future, Americans will be the immigrants to these other countries.
Centers of technology development can indeed move. Still, I think it is a bad sign if a society failed to install telephone landlines for all those decades they were fashionable. A society that can deal with some useful technologies but not all of them will not be in the technological frontline. It remains to see whether technologies like cell phones and will actually transform third world societies, or if it just gives them phones.
Mobile payments are very popular in Africa due to cell phone usage. I think that leapfrogged traditional banking as well. I’d guess it’s a matter of GDP growth rate as well, some will explode and some won’t. Argentina used to be one of the richest countries in the world and then cratered. And also if I can raise a child from birth to adulthood for an estimated $250k in the USA vs. $50k in another country, well maybe we’ll see some childrearing arbitrage. Or we’ll get pockets in the USA with higher birth rates, like rich neighborhoods in Austin, Dallas, etc. Just random thoughts, I’m not an expert. Thx for writing!
It's not just you being autistic. It can be extremely difficult to know if people are pretending to be politically correct when they are being actively deceptive. My sense of Elon Musk, and of everyone who talks about a birth rate crisis, is that they understand the situation clearly and are struggling to squeeze an argument through the Overton window.
As for the main thrust of your remarks... I won't say that you're wrong overall; in fact this kind of straightforward discussion of demographic trends is a breath of fresh air, and I definitely enjoyed reading it. But it feels as though you're smoothing over eddies and whorls in history and prehistory - or maybe your sense of the Old Days is different from mine.
Speaking at least for myself, I strongly doubt that malthusian situations pervaded the midlatitudes or even the subtropics over most of human existence. Yes, of course there were always times and places undergoing malthusian constraints, and obviously military expansionism has been a strong feature of population replacement - that's why India and Ireland both speak Indo-European languages, and share genes from the Yamnaya. But most of the time? I have a sense that most of the time, people were getting drunk on cider and throwing pinecones at their neighbors' cows, rather than staring at the last turnip in the village and wondering whether everybody over the next hill had any meat left that they could steal.
"My sense of Elon Musk, and of everyone who talks about a birth rate crisis, is that they understand the situation clearly and are struggling to squeeze an argument through the Overton window."
Thanks I needed a laugh
What they say and what they really support are two different things
I think there is a good argument that band hunter-gatherers were relatively peaceful, but at the moment we started to scale up from that into any kind of sustenance farming we started seeing a lot of conflicts over ressources.
See for example the first section of this article that discuss the egalitarian ways of hunter-gatherers, and the question of whether they lived peacefully:
The author Daniel Quinn had a good way of describing the pattern that maintained (relative) peace between tribes. He called it a pattern of "erratic retaliation":
> This might be described as a strategy of erratic retaliation: 'Give as good as you get, but don't be too predictable.' "In practice, give as good as you get means that if the Emms aren't bothering you, don't bother them, but if the Emms do bother you, then be sure to return the favor. Don't be too predictable means that even if the Emms aren't bothering you, it will be no bad thing if you make a hostile move against them from time to time. They will of course retaliate, giving as good as they get, but this is just a price to be paid for letting them know that you're there and haven't gotten soft. Then, once the score is even between you, you can get together for a big reconciliation party to celebrate your undying friendship and do some matchmaking (because, of course, it doesn't do to breed endlessly within a single tribe). "Although the strategy of the 'Erratic Retaliator' may sound rather combative, it's actually a peacekeeping strategy". - My Ishmael - page 40
This pattern was apparently used by a lot of Native American tribes, which predictably enough led to lots of conflict with the arriving settlers. They would just think that they had reached peace with a tribe, and then the tribe would randomly do a raiding attack to show that they were still to be respected, which the civilized settlers would see as a total betrayal and revenge with overwhelming force.
That was an interesting link by itself. I didn't like Peter Gray's way of insisting that everyone finds foragers are peaceful and then giving basically zero source - partly because I seriously doubt all foragers were like the foragers he describes. We actually have some modern cultures which are like that (Tove lives in one, sort of) and other cultures which aren't (e.g. Japan), so it'd be a surprise if all foraging cultures were uniformly that way. Still, it was a very interesting read, and if nothing else prompts some interesting ideas about the social importance of ridicule and play.
The My Ishmael quote lined up much better with my sense of things. I'd never heard of erratic retaliation as a strategy - it should really be called erratic *aggression* (with automatic retaliation and consequent forgiveness). But there seems to be something primordially *human* about this, the way I know humans.
Like, all the seniors at Polk High go vandalize the scoreboard of Kennedy High, and then Keennedy High plants marijuana in the star QB's locker at Kennedy High, and then screw it, they all just get together Friday night at farmer Brown's apple orchard and leave the place full of trash and empty beer cans
It all sounds very plausible and fits with what I have read about specific primitive societies. Whether such a system is to be considered peaceful or not should depend on the share of people that actually killed by human violence, I guess. The system you describe allure both low levels of human-caused deaths and rather high levels.
Me too! I don't think most of human history was Malthusian, but highly violent pre-Makthusian. People threw pinecones, spears and arrows at their neighbors. Today, there are only pockets of that kind of culture, most notably among criminal gangs. Although most of human history has been pre-Malthusian I don't think we are going back to that kind of stage. Once people have learned that living (and fighting) in big groups is possible there is no going back.
OK then look, I doubt Malthusian situations *or* the kind of perpetual warfare you describe there were the norm historically or prehistorically, at least outside the tropics. My sense is that lives were mostly safe and dull, punctuated by periods of tribal warfare and desperate roaming during lean times, and also occasionally by weirder stuff like new cults, waves of disease, omens in the sky, and bizarre fads promoted by visions or tales from across the sea.
The Yanomamö are significantly unrepresentative of most human groups on account of their habitat - warm and moist throughout the year, without any periods of dryness or cold to break up the monotony. Seasonal changes prompt shifts in strategy and behavior, with attendant cultural norms to deal with them. If Siberian tribesmen tried to live like the Yanomamö, they'd quickly discover that you'd better worry about something else besides raiding for women during the colder half of the year.
There certainly is a trade-off between war and subsistence. Either people fight for their right to party in the best spots. Or they fight for survival in the harsher spots where no one else want to be.
That thing was observed even among the Yanomamö. Also in the rainforest there are better and worse land for agriculture and transportation. The highlands had steeper slopes people had to deal with when working. Murder rates were much higher in the lowlands than in the highlands, something like 40 percent of men dead from violence in the lowlands and only about 20 percent in the highlands (I can't easily verify it, Google gives me only Woke links).
Australia had a lot of warfare, although the climate isn't great. Native Americans had both winter and systematic warfare. I think the Vikings are an example too. As I have understood it they were mostly herders. That is, they used the land more extensively than would prove possible a few hundred years later. Instead of turning every stone in search of food growing opportunities, they took their boats and stole all they could steal.
And the indigenous Australians were genetic isolates who lived in a warm, more-or-less winterless climate. If you claim they were locked into a perpetual cycle of raiding and violence like the Yanomamö, well, OK - although frankly I can't even find much evidence about them being warlike or peaceful, and my instincts say that there would have been plenty of times when these guys were dying from venomous spider bites and heatstroke rather than from each other.
That was a very strange theory about the Vikings. I always thought the Vikings had a rather primitive society. Terrorism requires a certain degree of sophistication. Much more than the Vikings had, according to all I know about them.
Primitive? The vikings? Granted, "viking" can mean different things to different people, and if you want to say a proper viking is *just* someone who carries out violent raids, you can. But around the time of Lindesfarne's infamous raid, the Germanic seafarers were part of an enormous trade network: https://www.historyonthenet.com/vikings-as-traders
That's basically what those guys were: wide-ranging sailors who blended piracy, mercantilism, and conquest. Piracy and conquest are not exactly what interest me about them; its their activity as merchants and traders. Trade is basically the manna of civilization, connecting huge numbers of people together by the flow of goods, technology, and ideas across enormous geographic and cultural spaces.
Here are some grave goods from the time period that have been recovered; it's not likely that they managed to get their hands on all of this, without also picking up any of the sophistication of the civilized people they were pillaging and trading with: https://www.thecollector.com/exotic-viking-burial-items-found-in-valhalla/
At this point he doesn't appear to think any are possible, in the sense of any that could be implemented over political and social resistance.
He's the kind of guy who thinks up solutions that probably would help if any but the most wonkish could even understand them (i.e. using impact prediction market investments to replace income tax). Getting women to want to have more kids earlier defeats even his ingenuity.
Is there a reason migration and immigration are being ignored? Migrants/Immigrants have provided relative population growth in many places around the world. In some cultures, acceptance and adoption of technology and the attendant cultural requirements to support it is common.
I have thought about writing a post about the idea to solve the population shortage with immigration. Basically, the idea seems to be that one part of the world is supposed to produce goods and services and another part of the world is supposed to produce people. When the people are ready to work, they are supposed to be moved from nursery land to production land.
I don't say that it can never work. But I know that it often doesn't work very well, because cultures which are good at producing people but not at producing goods and services are not that good at raising people into good producers. Take the Amish for example. Since the Amish have to quit school at 14, they produce few engineers and doctors for mainstream society.
OK, certainly all of the considerations in this article are important to the discussion. But my attitudes are colored by being a USAnian, which means I have a deep faith in the powers of immigration and assimilation. The evidence seems to be that it takes immigrants to the US three or four generations to become socioeconomically indistinguishable from the rest of the population. But that leads to the idea that memes (a decent umbrella for all of the characteristics you discuss) are passed not only vertically (from one's parents) but horizontally (incorporated from the surrounding culture) and also imported (from elsewhere). It does seem that the "high culture" of the US didn't evolve uniformly across its territory, but was generated in certain hothouse locations and subsequently diffused across the US. So it's possible that it will diffuse across parts of the world that now have little of it.
A real analysis would require fully understanding the dynamics of cultural propagation in a location, including not only people's conservatism but also the effect of the local competitive dynamic driving adoption of imported innovations. But that is really hard.
I have wondered whether the rapid industrialization of East Asia has been partly due to the racism of the West's immigration rules over that period. E.g. if you learned an imported skill in Japan circa 1900 you had to stay in Japan; you couldn't move to the West to get paid better for it. But I've read a news story about a big bank in Nigeria that gave up on training risk analysts (they started outsourcing it to the West) because once they trained someone in risk analysis, the trained person quickly emigrated to the West. This makes the Africa situation resemble the backwards parts of industrialized countries, with steady emigration to more prosperous places.
Some actual data might be wrung from assessing low-tech, high-birth-rate subcultures. E.g. the Amish and Orthodox Jewish in the US. What is their birth rate and what is the overall population growth rate of those cultures? I don't recall seeing claims that the Amish population is rising nearly as fast as their birth rate suggests, suggesting that the emigration rate is rather high.
Memes do move horizontally and immigration has often been successful. The problem is the evolutionary process that is going on. Almost all cultures get encompassed by high-tech culture. Which lowers their birthrate. Which leaves having children to the few cultures that are capable of resisting being incorporated in high-tech society. The longer time this goes on, the more children will be born in cultures that are resilient to high-tech society. In the 20th century, people from groups that just hadn't had the time to modernize moved into high-tech society. With time, such groups get replaced by groups that resist modernization.
>>But I've read a news story about a big bank in Nigeria that gave up on training risk analysts (they started outsourcing it to the West) because once they trained someone in risk analysis, the trained person quickly emigrated to the West.
It seems like talking about brain-drain has become unfashionable. But it should be some kind of thing.
>>I don't recall seeing claims that the Amish population is rising nearly as fast as their birth rate suggests, suggesting that the emigration rate is rather high.
The Amish have higher retention rates than most religious groups. Estimates I have read say about 90 percent. More women than men stay and the most conservative Amish groups have the highest retention rates. I found the information in Eric Kauffman's Will the Religious Inherit the Earth and Donald Craybill's books on the Amish.
Normally I'm not a fan of U.N. projections, but unlike for climate change, my understanding is that U.N. projections have much more closely tracked with the evidence. I think the pro-natalist argument, based directly or indirectly on the U.N. projections, is that economic growth is inversely correlated with fertility, and no one really knows the exact reason(s) why. If Africa and other low fertility nations stay on track, they will presumably reach the same fertility levels and then population will start to decline in some number of decades.
Your argument seems plausible, but I would imagine you'd want to at least try to deal with the steelman of the pro-natalist argument, e.g. maybe the U.N. models have some flaws or I'm not up-to-date on some divergence between their projections and reality.
Based on what? Some idea that humans are naturally inclined to keep a fertility level of 2? For such reasons I haven't taken the projections seriously.
I read a book called Youthquake some time ago. It says that there is something about Africa that makes its fertility sticky. Fertility has decreased in Africa, but not as much as fertility in other parts of the world with the same level of wealth. Nigeria is richer than India, for example, but much more fertile. I think this could partially be explained by the different types of wealth in Nigeria and India. Nigeria has oil and Western aid, which boosts the numbers without affecting ordinary people that much. But it could also be that there genuinely is an Africa factor.
Figure II.2 breaks down by continent including a plot for Africa. The trends do all seem to be going down in the current data and the projections seem quite reasonable.
Given that the projections are guesses, I find them as reasonable as any guesses, more or less. But I think that even if the UN scenario actually happens at 2100, the world will not look like that in 2200 or 2300. By then the more fertile groups will have had time to procreate enough to be clearly visible in the statistics.
Fine post and I agree with 3 central points (humanity is not close to extinction by low TFR / it is about 'western civilisation', better: first world / it would be bad if our tech of all kinds got lost - and as a bonus: I find this couple to be weirdly interesting, too).
I differ a bit: a) TFR going down pretty much everywhere will go strongly for a longer time - GDP per capita growing, and even the ppl in Mali and Niger will all have smartphones and wifi this century -urbanisation strong and growing, esp in those poor countries. And big cities are "population sinks". Even in Pakistan. Mormons are now heading below 2.1 I heard, even the Amish may go 'down' to TFR 3. Also: No Amish in Japan, or are they?
b) 'Keeping' the tech-level should be much easier than advancing it. Bad news for Mars-missions, but the Internet is not going to disappear. - It will take a looooong time till the number of ppl with college STEM-degrees will fall back to 1905 levels (Einstein's big year).
c) One segment of the US population with a TFR of over 2.1 is: Households with an income over 1 million/year. Which gives me more hope than the Amish.
Not as far as I know (I know far too little about Japan and Japanese culture, book tips are very welcome). So there is nothing to do: Someone will probably need to invade those islands when they get too empty.
I'm flattered that you read this article, especially given that you didn't read the book the prompted this post!
But the article gives a good sense of the Amish I know. I used to find them much more interesting when I thought they really were weirdos, but really they're just very sincere, *true* Christians, in a way that not many non-Amish Christians are. I've done that, and don't think it works - the problems in the Bible mean Christianity has a drain that you can't ever plug, a drain through which the sincere and intelligent will always leak out.
Anders read the article too! From beginning to end. People who are even weirder than us clearly interest us.
You have met Amish people. I have read books by Amish people. So we know some different things, I guess. When reading books by Amish people, I'm surprised by how unweird they are. For example, Amish wife Lena Yoder is doing normal Western self-help talk: She just spices it with God. Her colleague Marianne Janzi is just a normal positive, constructive woman among women. The lack of electricity is just a fact for her, and she is doing the best of it. Amish bachelor Loren Beachy has a fair deal of slapstick humor: People fall off chairs, run after their horses and release each other's cows for fun.
Not entirely normal: lots of Russians - with low birth rate - (and Volga-Germans) left after 1990 AND the new national(ist) leadership wanted very much to promote "Kazakhstanisation": filling all those vacant posts with 'native' people (Soviet-Russians had looked very much down on the natives) and creating lots of new jobs, too. With attractive salaries/perks promoting more kids, too. There was and is enough gas to pay for those. - As for an "entirely normal" developed (!) Muslim country: Turkey's TFR is at 1.62 (Istanbul and Ankara region below 1.3) . TFR not over 2,1 since 2003. But sure: Some Kurdish regions are growing, one with over 3. https://data.tuik.gov.tr/Bulten/Index?p=Birth-Statistics-2022-49673&dil=2
Also Tunisia, Morocco and Indonesia not over 2.1. And Egypt not much above.
Yes, you are right, several Muslim countries have rather low fertility rates. Iran also has a low fertility rate. Yemen (3.89) and Iraq (3.55) are rather high. Syria too (2.8) . But they might actually be the outliers.
Great post! I'm not that much of a doomer on this at least in time scale of a few generations. The low-tech lifestyle is attractive enough to retain enough of its members to keep growing only with massive support from the rest of society which puts a limit on how large they can grow. But it could get violent if these cultures are allowed to grow large before getting into conflict with the rest of society. The policy should aim to maintain a balance between the urban, educated lifestyle that drives technological progress but drains population and the small-town or rural lifestyle with close family networks that is consistent with both high productivity and TFR high enough to sustain itself as well as city populations. And to lure people away from expansive low-tech cultures.
In the short and medium term, it's more decline than doom. High-tech civilization isn't disappearing soon - it just achieves much less than it could have done with more people. For example, it doesn't colonize new areas anymore. Many people say, or at least imply, that it would have been right to leave America to the Comanche and other native societies instead of colonizing it. I prefer not to have an opinion on the matter (history won't change anyway), but I think we can be rather certain that there would have been less technology in the world if America weren't colonized by Europeans. And this is what is happening now: Western civilization isn't expanding, new high-tech countries aren't built up. Which means technology is developing much less than it could have.
>>The policy should aim to maintain a balance between the urban, educated lifestyle that drives technological progress but drains population and the small-town or rural lifestyle with close family networks that is consistent with both high productivity and TFR high enough to sustain itself as well as city populations. And to lure people away from expansive low-tech cultures.
I think the interaction between producing people and breeding people will be one of the big issues in the future. Obviously, the most efficient and productive mode of living we know can't produce enough children to sustain itself. With what culture can it cooperate to get new people for every generation? That is a very good question.
That is a better and more general way to describe it. What I described is restoring the balance between two cultures that always were in symbiosis but where one of them has eaten more of the other than is sustainable. It's possible there are other cultures that could feed it but I'm not convinced the alternatives are better.
The more I think of it, the less I think that I understand what you mean. Which two cultures have been in symbiosis? Hillbilly culture and highly educated culture, where the former supplies the latter with people?
https://x.com/morebirths/status/1822324954395767018?s=46&t=qA5o3fEzJwLD4iOPHuEZJA
The problem is that this brings you to eugenics
You're probably a eugenicist
https://dissentient.substack.com/p/eugenicist
Non-Breeders are parasitical versus breeders.
Consider, you get to collect Social Security and Medicare regardless of how many children you had, even though these are pay as you go systems that inevitably have to be paid for by the next generation.*
A proper system would make non-breeders pay higher taxes and transfer the money to breeders, to internalize the externalities. This would have to be MUCH larger than has ever been tried before (hundreds of thousands of dollars in value per kid). All previous attempts at paying breeders have been incredibly wimpy (like 1% of overall child cost, no wonder it doesn't work).
It would simultaneously be expensive and not expensive when you run the math. It's within our capabilities.
Assistance should be cash based, not subsidies for daycare or the like (most people who have 3+ kids would prefer to be SAHM, daycare isn't useful for them).
Also, school vouchers is a completely cost free way to increase value to parenting.
You could slant the subsidies towards higher earners and married couples while giving everyone a slice of the pie, to keep up eugenics.
I suspect this would solve the problem if implemented. The issue is that it lowers economic growth in the short term (those "assets" don't start contributing for 20+ years) and it doesn't appeal to the median voter (55+ and not giving a shit about other peoples kids).
*Even if not pay as you go it doesn't change much because someone actually has to provide the services in your retirement in exchange for assets, so if there is no younger generation your asset is worthless.
1. Classifying people as breeders or non genders is dehumanizing
2. In a workplace , the opposite is very much true.
You don't seem to factor in the fact that Africans don't (want to) stay in Africa. They're constantly migrating and more would readily do so if the barriers are lowered. Nations whose populations are depleting only have to open their borders to burgeoning and restless Africans. Population transfer is not new and can be carried out on a grand scale if westernized society's population becomes too depleted for survival.
South Africa literally can't keep the lights on.
Africans are indeed self-colonizing through moving to the West. The question his whether the surplus populations of low-tech societies, African and other, will be able and willing to uphold high-tech societies.
I believe the perceived culture and values of the receiving nations would self-select for those Africans who are capable of and "willing to uphold high-tech societies".
It does. At least some Western countries, like the US and the UK, tend to attract people who want to transit from the Third World to First World. (Countries like Sweden, with high wages and high unemployment benefits, tend more to attract people who want to keep their culture and get paid for it).
But those people who are willing and capable to change culture are probably a finite resource. Those who transit to high-tech society have few children themselves. That way, there is an ongoing evolution where people who can resist being assimilated in high-tech societies are selected for.
One thing to track down is an offhand comment I read in one of Gregory Clarke's books: In Britain before 1850 people were typically downwardly-mobile, the rich had more (surviving) children than the poor. But after 1850, the reverse was true. 1850 in Britain is recent enough it should be possible to discern the detailed dynamic of this change, which should make it easier to predict the future of these trends.
People being OK with children being downwardly mobile is important. I think a big part of that is if one believes that a child that has less SES will still have good life. If you think life is terrible just one rung down you are going to be paranoid about it.
Excellent article. My 2 cents: I do not believe the fertility problem is a problem of technology per se. It's a problem of lack of religion and some(most?) religions are more or less anti-technology. But not all and it doesn't have to be that way. So the solution of fixing the Western civilization and white race must be some kind of new religion, compatible with the technology advancement. For example, Buddhism has never interfered with technological advancement. But in any case, the elephant in the room is simple - Western civilization with its genetic carrier white people - are facing a grave danger. We are more than capable to sustain ourselves even with shrinking population, but the current political situation (Marxism) with the open borders, weak state and complete inability to defend ourselves in the face of groups that openly hate us, is making the future looks very very doomed.
This seems worth taking seriously by those of us in the technologically advanced world. But the elephant in the room is that discussing it is easy labelled as racist. Thanks for consistently being one of the most thoughtful bloggers on here.
I think we'll get a lot of "technology leapfrogging" as has been written about. Societies like rural Africa, that didn't have telephone landlines, skipped over that phase and into cell phone use. Areas with bad electricity infrastructure (dependent on the state) are increasingly using solar and becoming more energy independent. Technology creation, like that of auto manufacturing and software engineering is leaving the US for less expensive areas like Mexico and India. Maybe in the future, Americans will be the immigrants to these other countries.
Centers of technology development can indeed move. Still, I think it is a bad sign if a society failed to install telephone landlines for all those decades they were fashionable. A society that can deal with some useful technologies but not all of them will not be in the technological frontline. It remains to see whether technologies like cell phones and will actually transform third world societies, or if it just gives them phones.
Also, adopting the better tech of advanced societies isn't pushing the envelope.
Mobile payments are very popular in Africa due to cell phone usage. I think that leapfrogged traditional banking as well. I’d guess it’s a matter of GDP growth rate as well, some will explode and some won’t. Argentina used to be one of the richest countries in the world and then cratered. And also if I can raise a child from birth to adulthood for an estimated $250k in the USA vs. $50k in another country, well maybe we’ll see some childrearing arbitrage. Or we’ll get pockets in the USA with higher birth rates, like rich neighborhoods in Austin, Dallas, etc. Just random thoughts, I’m not an expert. Thx for writing!
It's not just you being autistic. It can be extremely difficult to know if people are pretending to be politically correct when they are being actively deceptive. My sense of Elon Musk, and of everyone who talks about a birth rate crisis, is that they understand the situation clearly and are struggling to squeeze an argument through the Overton window.
As for the main thrust of your remarks... I won't say that you're wrong overall; in fact this kind of straightforward discussion of demographic trends is a breath of fresh air, and I definitely enjoyed reading it. But it feels as though you're smoothing over eddies and whorls in history and prehistory - or maybe your sense of the Old Days is different from mine.
Speaking at least for myself, I strongly doubt that malthusian situations pervaded the midlatitudes or even the subtropics over most of human existence. Yes, of course there were always times and places undergoing malthusian constraints, and obviously military expansionism has been a strong feature of population replacement - that's why India and Ireland both speak Indo-European languages, and share genes from the Yamnaya. But most of the time? I have a sense that most of the time, people were getting drunk on cider and throwing pinecones at their neighbors' cows, rather than staring at the last turnip in the village and wondering whether everybody over the next hill had any meat left that they could steal.
"My sense of Elon Musk, and of everyone who talks about a birth rate crisis, is that they understand the situation clearly and are struggling to squeeze an argument through the Overton window."
Thanks I needed a laugh
What they say and what they really support are two different things
I think there is a good argument that band hunter-gatherers were relatively peaceful, but at the moment we started to scale up from that into any kind of sustenance farming we started seeing a lot of conflicts over ressources.
See for example the first section of this article that discuss the egalitarian ways of hunter-gatherers, and the question of whether they lived peacefully:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways
The author Daniel Quinn had a good way of describing the pattern that maintained (relative) peace between tribes. He called it a pattern of "erratic retaliation":
> This might be described as a strategy of erratic retaliation: 'Give as good as you get, but don't be too predictable.' "In practice, give as good as you get means that if the Emms aren't bothering you, don't bother them, but if the Emms do bother you, then be sure to return the favor. Don't be too predictable means that even if the Emms aren't bothering you, it will be no bad thing if you make a hostile move against them from time to time. They will of course retaliate, giving as good as they get, but this is just a price to be paid for letting them know that you're there and haven't gotten soft. Then, once the score is even between you, you can get together for a big reconciliation party to celebrate your undying friendship and do some matchmaking (because, of course, it doesn't do to breed endlessly within a single tribe). "Although the strategy of the 'Erratic Retaliator' may sound rather combative, it's actually a peacekeeping strategy". - My Ishmael - page 40
This pattern was apparently used by a lot of Native American tribes, which predictably enough led to lots of conflict with the arriving settlers. They would just think that they had reached peace with a tribe, and then the tribe would randomly do a raiding attack to show that they were still to be respected, which the civilized settlers would see as a total betrayal and revenge with overwhelming force.
That was an interesting link by itself. I didn't like Peter Gray's way of insisting that everyone finds foragers are peaceful and then giving basically zero source - partly because I seriously doubt all foragers were like the foragers he describes. We actually have some modern cultures which are like that (Tove lives in one, sort of) and other cultures which aren't (e.g. Japan), so it'd be a surprise if all foraging cultures were uniformly that way. Still, it was a very interesting read, and if nothing else prompts some interesting ideas about the social importance of ridicule and play.
The My Ishmael quote lined up much better with my sense of things. I'd never heard of erratic retaliation as a strategy - it should really be called erratic *aggression* (with automatic retaliation and consequent forgiveness). But there seems to be something primordially *human* about this, the way I know humans.
Like, all the seniors at Polk High go vandalize the scoreboard of Kennedy High, and then Keennedy High plants marijuana in the star QB's locker at Kennedy High, and then screw it, they all just get together Friday night at farmer Brown's apple orchard and leave the place full of trash and empty beer cans
It all sounds very plausible and fits with what I have read about specific primitive societies. Whether such a system is to be considered peaceful or not should depend on the share of people that actually killed by human violence, I guess. The system you describe allure both low levels of human-caused deaths and rather high levels.
>>I strongly doubt that malthusian situations pervaded the midlatitudes or even the subtropics over most of human existence.
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-still
Me too! I don't think most of human history was Malthusian, but highly violent pre-Makthusian. People threw pinecones, spears and arrows at their neighbors. Today, there are only pockets of that kind of culture, most notably among criminal gangs. Although most of human history has been pre-Malthusian I don't think we are going back to that kind of stage. Once people have learned that living (and fighting) in big groups is possible there is no going back.
OK then look, I doubt Malthusian situations *or* the kind of perpetual warfare you describe there were the norm historically or prehistorically, at least outside the tropics. My sense is that lives were mostly safe and dull, punctuated by periods of tribal warfare and desperate roaming during lean times, and also occasionally by weirder stuff like new cults, waves of disease, omens in the sky, and bizarre fads promoted by visions or tales from across the sea.
The Yanomamö are significantly unrepresentative of most human groups on account of their habitat - warm and moist throughout the year, without any periods of dryness or cold to break up the monotony. Seasonal changes prompt shifts in strategy and behavior, with attendant cultural norms to deal with them. If Siberian tribesmen tried to live like the Yanomamö, they'd quickly discover that you'd better worry about something else besides raiding for women during the colder half of the year.
There certainly is a trade-off between war and subsistence. Either people fight for their right to party in the best spots. Or they fight for survival in the harsher spots where no one else want to be.
That thing was observed even among the Yanomamö. Also in the rainforest there are better and worse land for agriculture and transportation. The highlands had steeper slopes people had to deal with when working. Murder rates were much higher in the lowlands than in the highlands, something like 40 percent of men dead from violence in the lowlands and only about 20 percent in the highlands (I can't easily verify it, Google gives me only Woke links).
Australia had a lot of warfare, although the climate isn't great. Native Americans had both winter and systematic warfare. I think the Vikings are an example too. As I have understood it they were mostly herders. That is, they used the land more extensively than would prove possible a few hundred years later. Instead of turning every stone in search of food growing opportunities, they took their boats and stole all they could steal.
Perpetually, Tove? Was it *perpetual* raiding?
The Vikings were galvanized by the looming threat of Christianity, and were notoriously violent compared to their neighbors https://www.historyextra.com/period/viking/why-did-the-vikings-violent-raids-begin/ (This article is actually really interesting in its own right)
Amerindians were warlike or peaceful depending on the group. https://www.quora.com/Were-Native-Americans-a-peaceful-people-or-was-there-much-infighting-between-different-tribes-during-their-history?share=1 (This article is just me citing a source because sources mean this is the Internet)
And the indigenous Australians were genetic isolates who lived in a warm, more-or-less winterless climate. If you claim they were locked into a perpetual cycle of raiding and violence like the Yanomamö, well, OK - although frankly I can't even find much evidence about them being warlike or peaceful, and my instincts say that there would have been plenty of times when these guys were dying from venomous spider bites and heatstroke rather than from each other.
That was a very strange theory about the Vikings. I always thought the Vikings had a rather primitive society. Terrorism requires a certain degree of sophistication. Much more than the Vikings had, according to all I know about them.
Primitive? The vikings? Granted, "viking" can mean different things to different people, and if you want to say a proper viking is *just* someone who carries out violent raids, you can. But around the time of Lindesfarne's infamous raid, the Germanic seafarers were part of an enormous trade network: https://www.historyonthenet.com/vikings-as-traders
That's basically what those guys were: wide-ranging sailors who blended piracy, mercantilism, and conquest. Piracy and conquest are not exactly what interest me about them; its their activity as merchants and traders. Trade is basically the manna of civilization, connecting huge numbers of people together by the flow of goods, technology, and ideas across enormous geographic and cultural spaces.
Here are some grave goods from the time period that have been recovered; it's not likely that they managed to get their hands on all of this, without also picking up any of the sophistication of the civilized people they were pillaging and trading with: https://www.thecollector.com/exotic-viking-burial-items-found-in-valhalla/
Your final point about preserving high tech culture is what Robin Hanson says explicitly and what I think Elon Musk actually means.
Interesting! Does he, I mean, Robin Hanson propose any solutions except having more children?
At this point he doesn't appear to think any are possible, in the sense of any that could be implemented over political and social resistance.
He's the kind of guy who thinks up solutions that probably would help if any but the most wonkish could even understand them (i.e. using impact prediction market investments to replace income tax). Getting women to want to have more kids earlier defeats even his ingenuity.
Is there a reason migration and immigration are being ignored? Migrants/Immigrants have provided relative population growth in many places around the world. In some cultures, acceptance and adoption of technology and the attendant cultural requirements to support it is common.
I have thought about writing a post about the idea to solve the population shortage with immigration. Basically, the idea seems to be that one part of the world is supposed to produce goods and services and another part of the world is supposed to produce people. When the people are ready to work, they are supposed to be moved from nursery land to production land.
I don't say that it can never work. But I know that it often doesn't work very well, because cultures which are good at producing people but not at producing goods and services are not that good at raising people into good producers. Take the Amish for example. Since the Amish have to quit school at 14, they produce few engineers and doctors for mainstream society.
OK, certainly all of the considerations in this article are important to the discussion. But my attitudes are colored by being a USAnian, which means I have a deep faith in the powers of immigration and assimilation. The evidence seems to be that it takes immigrants to the US three or four generations to become socioeconomically indistinguishable from the rest of the population. But that leads to the idea that memes (a decent umbrella for all of the characteristics you discuss) are passed not only vertically (from one's parents) but horizontally (incorporated from the surrounding culture) and also imported (from elsewhere). It does seem that the "high culture" of the US didn't evolve uniformly across its territory, but was generated in certain hothouse locations and subsequently diffused across the US. So it's possible that it will diffuse across parts of the world that now have little of it.
A real analysis would require fully understanding the dynamics of cultural propagation in a location, including not only people's conservatism but also the effect of the local competitive dynamic driving adoption of imported innovations. But that is really hard.
I have wondered whether the rapid industrialization of East Asia has been partly due to the racism of the West's immigration rules over that period. E.g. if you learned an imported skill in Japan circa 1900 you had to stay in Japan; you couldn't move to the West to get paid better for it. But I've read a news story about a big bank in Nigeria that gave up on training risk analysts (they started outsourcing it to the West) because once they trained someone in risk analysis, the trained person quickly emigrated to the West. This makes the Africa situation resemble the backwards parts of industrialized countries, with steady emigration to more prosperous places.
Some actual data might be wrung from assessing low-tech, high-birth-rate subcultures. E.g. the Amish and Orthodox Jewish in the US. What is their birth rate and what is the overall population growth rate of those cultures? I don't recall seeing claims that the Amish population is rising nearly as fast as their birth rate suggests, suggesting that the emigration rate is rather high.
Memes do move horizontally and immigration has often been successful. The problem is the evolutionary process that is going on. Almost all cultures get encompassed by high-tech culture. Which lowers their birthrate. Which leaves having children to the few cultures that are capable of resisting being incorporated in high-tech society. The longer time this goes on, the more children will be born in cultures that are resilient to high-tech society. In the 20th century, people from groups that just hadn't had the time to modernize moved into high-tech society. With time, such groups get replaced by groups that resist modernization.
>>But I've read a news story about a big bank in Nigeria that gave up on training risk analysts (they started outsourcing it to the West) because once they trained someone in risk analysis, the trained person quickly emigrated to the West.
It seems like talking about brain-drain has become unfashionable. But it should be some kind of thing.
>>I don't recall seeing claims that the Amish population is rising nearly as fast as their birth rate suggests, suggesting that the emigration rate is rather high.
The Amish have higher retention rates than most religious groups. Estimates I have read say about 90 percent. More women than men stay and the most conservative Amish groups have the highest retention rates. I found the information in Eric Kauffman's Will the Religious Inherit the Earth and Donald Craybill's books on the Amish.
Normally I'm not a fan of U.N. projections, but unlike for climate change, my understanding is that U.N. projections have much more closely tracked with the evidence. I think the pro-natalist argument, based directly or indirectly on the U.N. projections, is that economic growth is inversely correlated with fertility, and no one really knows the exact reason(s) why. If Africa and other low fertility nations stay on track, they will presumably reach the same fertility levels and then population will start to decline in some number of decades.
Your argument seems plausible, but I would imagine you'd want to at least try to deal with the steelman of the pro-natalist argument, e.g. maybe the U.N. models have some flaws or I'm not up-to-date on some divergence between their projections and reality.
I have to admit that I don't understand the UN projections. Basically they assume that the whole world will have a total fertility rate of about two in a hundred years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth#/media/File%3ATotal_Fertility_Rate_for_6_Regions_and_the_World%2C_1950-2100%2C_UN2022.svg
Based on what? Some idea that humans are naturally inclined to keep a fertility level of 2? For such reasons I haven't taken the projections seriously.
I read a book called Youthquake some time ago. It says that there is something about Africa that makes its fertility sticky. Fertility has decreased in Africa, but not as much as fertility in other parts of the world with the same level of wealth. Nigeria is richer than India, for example, but much more fertile. I think this could partially be explained by the different types of wealth in Nigeria and India. Nigeria has oil and Western aid, which boosts the numbers without affecting ordinary people that much. But it could also be that there genuinely is an Africa factor.
Could be, I certainly don't know the nuances well. Looks like this is their methodology: https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2022_Methodology.pdf
Here's the actual report: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/wpp2022_summary_of_results.pdf
Figure II.2 breaks down by continent including a plot for Africa. The trends do all seem to be going down in the current data and the projections seem quite reasonable.
Given that the projections are guesses, I find them as reasonable as any guesses, more or less. But I think that even if the UN scenario actually happens at 2100, the world will not look like that in 2200 or 2300. By then the more fertile groups will have had time to procreate enough to be clearly visible in the statistics.
Fine post and I agree with 3 central points (humanity is not close to extinction by low TFR / it is about 'western civilisation', better: first world / it would be bad if our tech of all kinds got lost - and as a bonus: I find this couple to be weirdly interesting, too).
I differ a bit: a) TFR going down pretty much everywhere will go strongly for a longer time - GDP per capita growing, and even the ppl in Mali and Niger will all have smartphones and wifi this century -urbanisation strong and growing, esp in those poor countries. And big cities are "population sinks". Even in Pakistan. Mormons are now heading below 2.1 I heard, even the Amish may go 'down' to TFR 3. Also: No Amish in Japan, or are they?
b) 'Keeping' the tech-level should be much easier than advancing it. Bad news for Mars-missions, but the Internet is not going to disappear. - It will take a looooong time till the number of ppl with college STEM-degrees will fall back to 1905 levels (Einstein's big year).
c) One segment of the US population with a TFR of over 2.1 is: Households with an income over 1 million/year. Which gives me more hope than the Amish.
>>No Amish in Japan, or are they?
Not as far as I know (I know far too little about Japan and Japanese culture, book tips are very welcome). So there is nothing to do: Someone will probably need to invade those islands when they get too empty.
The Amish are all over the place. The Amish I know tell me there are even Amish in Tasmania, that little island south of Australia, and the Internet corroborates: https://www.smh.com.au/national/meet-the-mccallums-one-of-australia-s-few-amish-families-20181016-p509xn.html
Interesting article. More of two weirdos with eight children than a community. But interesting weirdos.
I'm flattered that you read this article, especially given that you didn't read the book the prompted this post!
But the article gives a good sense of the Amish I know. I used to find them much more interesting when I thought they really were weirdos, but really they're just very sincere, *true* Christians, in a way that not many non-Amish Christians are. I've done that, and don't think it works - the problems in the Bible mean Christianity has a drain that you can't ever plug, a drain through which the sincere and intelligent will always leak out.
Anders read the article too! From beginning to end. People who are even weirder than us clearly interest us.
You have met Amish people. I have read books by Amish people. So we know some different things, I guess. When reading books by Amish people, I'm surprised by how unweird they are. For example, Amish wife Lena Yoder is doing normal Western self-help talk: She just spices it with God. Her colleague Marianne Janzi is just a normal positive, constructive woman among women. The lack of electricity is just a fact for her, and she is doing the best of it. Amish bachelor Loren Beachy has a fair deal of slapstick humor: People fall off chairs, run after their horses and release each other's cows for fun.
Yes. And their cousins the Mennonites are in South America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mennonites_in_Bolivia
https://x.com/morebirths/status/1717805477621583940 I just thought you’d find it interesting
You got that link from ACX lynx just now, I dare to presume? ;)
Yeah. It was long list so easy to miss
I'm happy for this kind of help, since I have more and more gotten off ACX. I had no idea there was a lynx post.
That is interesting. Kazakhstan became an entirely normal Muslim country.
Not entirely normal: lots of Russians - with low birth rate - (and Volga-Germans) left after 1990 AND the new national(ist) leadership wanted very much to promote "Kazakhstanisation": filling all those vacant posts with 'native' people (Soviet-Russians had looked very much down on the natives) and creating lots of new jobs, too. With attractive salaries/perks promoting more kids, too. There was and is enough gas to pay for those. - As for an "entirely normal" developed (!) Muslim country: Turkey's TFR is at 1.62 (Istanbul and Ankara region below 1.3) . TFR not over 2,1 since 2003. But sure: Some Kurdish regions are growing, one with over 3. https://data.tuik.gov.tr/Bulten/Index?p=Birth-Statistics-2022-49673&dil=2
Also Tunisia, Morocco and Indonesia not over 2.1. And Egypt not much above.
Yes, you are right, several Muslim countries have rather low fertility rates. Iran also has a low fertility rate. Yemen (3.89) and Iraq (3.55) are rather high. Syria too (2.8) . But they might actually be the outliers.
Great post! I'm not that much of a doomer on this at least in time scale of a few generations. The low-tech lifestyle is attractive enough to retain enough of its members to keep growing only with massive support from the rest of society which puts a limit on how large they can grow. But it could get violent if these cultures are allowed to grow large before getting into conflict with the rest of society. The policy should aim to maintain a balance between the urban, educated lifestyle that drives technological progress but drains population and the small-town or rural lifestyle with close family networks that is consistent with both high productivity and TFR high enough to sustain itself as well as city populations. And to lure people away from expansive low-tech cultures.
In the short and medium term, it's more decline than doom. High-tech civilization isn't disappearing soon - it just achieves much less than it could have done with more people. For example, it doesn't colonize new areas anymore. Many people say, or at least imply, that it would have been right to leave America to the Comanche and other native societies instead of colonizing it. I prefer not to have an opinion on the matter (history won't change anyway), but I think we can be rather certain that there would have been less technology in the world if America weren't colonized by Europeans. And this is what is happening now: Western civilization isn't expanding, new high-tech countries aren't built up. Which means technology is developing much less than it could have.
>>The policy should aim to maintain a balance between the urban, educated lifestyle that drives technological progress but drains population and the small-town or rural lifestyle with close family networks that is consistent with both high productivity and TFR high enough to sustain itself as well as city populations. And to lure people away from expansive low-tech cultures.
I think the interaction between producing people and breeding people will be one of the big issues in the future. Obviously, the most efficient and productive mode of living we know can't produce enough children to sustain itself. With what culture can it cooperate to get new people for every generation? That is a very good question.
That is a better and more general way to describe it. What I described is restoring the balance between two cultures that always were in symbiosis but where one of them has eaten more of the other than is sustainable. It's possible there are other cultures that could feed it but I'm not convinced the alternatives are better.
The more I think of it, the less I think that I understand what you mean. Which two cultures have been in symbiosis? Hillbilly culture and highly educated culture, where the former supplies the latter with people?