The Age of Depopulation

I think the author is right that comparatively few people have really bent their heads around this. But I am reminded of the Club of Rome studies in the 1970s, when a more Malthusian future seemed inevitable.

Trends don't necessarily continue; very often, they change the circumstance that gave rise to the trend in some way. When populations are half what they are now, housing will likely be cheaper, wages higher, the share of wealth controlled by the elderly lower. Maybe that will change the trend.

Interesting times coming. Not necessarily happy ones, but.

> Eventually, in 1994, the economist Lant Pritchett discovered the most powerful national fertility predictor ever detected. That decisive factor turned out to be simple: what women want. Because survey data conventionally focus on female fertility preferences, not those of their husbands or partners, scholars know much more about women’s desire for children than men’s. Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.

I want to draw attention to this specific quote, because it gets to the root cause of the depopulation situation. Fertility rates are aligning to desired fertility of women, and while this perspective might seem dated based on the 1994 date in the quote, I believe there is substantial evidence that this thesis still holds true today (citations provided in my comments in the subthread below).

If this is indeed the case, and population decline is truly caused by aggregate intentional choice with regards to reduced/lower fertility, it is unlikely this (if one considers it a challenge) can be solved for by increasing fertility rates via policy. Therefore, humanity should attempt to forecast the future, and plan mitigations and contingencies around the fact there there will be less humans and labor in the future.

What's the case for higher population? As someone who spends time actually in the wild, my perspective is we've used up enough of that and can't afford to take any more. Population growth seems required by modern economies, but is there some other requirement I'm not aware of making that growth desirable? Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people.

> So far, government attempts to incentivize childbearing have failed to bring fertility rates back to replacement levels. Future government policy, regardless of its ambition, will not stave off depopulation.

I find this to be amusing, because as far as I can tell government policies are a major cause of depopulation in the first place.

Women don't want to have children because having children is no longer a net positive. Having children is no longer a net positive because they are not relied upon in old age--the government will support you with medicare, medicaid, etc. If women felt that having children was a requirement to be taken care of in old age, they'd go right back to having four kids each.

On the bright side, this problem seems likely (in the absence of extreme levels of immigration) to solve itself naturally. As the population curve inverts further, we'll have fewer resources to take care of our elders, and young women will realize that having a few kids (who can support them later) is vastly preferable to the alternative of spending their old age in squalor--just as it used to be.

I find it disturbing how obsessed HN is with population decline. There is a new article about it every few days.