In Poland, where I come from, a few years ago a right wing populist party won the elections partially due to proposing a child subsidy called 500+. At the time it was the highest direct cash child subsidy-per-GDP in the world. While it did push many poor families over the poverty line, the impact on fertility was modest at best.
As a libertarian, I have always been against high taxation and welfare. However the more I think of it, I see no better option that BIG direct cash subsidies - way bigger than 500+/800+(as updated this year) or anything else that has been tried elsewhere.
The root cause of fertility issues is that in WEIRD countries, having (many) children is signalling low status. Single, childless couple = high status. This needs to be flipped. One way the governments could try to accomplish it is with ad campaigns, billboards, propaganda - we all know how poorly this usually works out. But what the government CAN do effectively is tax and redistribute.
Many young middle class people say that they can't afford having children. The subsidy system should be designed such that young people could not afford NOT having children.
People are competing for the same things and having fewer children is seen as a cheap way to boost ones competitive position. All you need to do is make it so having fewer children isn't seen as an easy way to get a leg up.
the biggest problem is that the window of having children is so small (maybe two decades) and badly overlaps with being/becoming adult (mature) enough to be a good parent (two decades minues 5-10 years) and this clashes badly with education required to do anything in a modern economy so one can be materially in a good place to raise children well enough. This is good because it means the means to produce meat waves of soldiers for the glory of psychopathic leaders like Putin... is now past. Fertility extension is a better option to blue sky into being than life extension per se. Bu tmaybe they are linked.
Normally you relish in the nuance of complex topics, but I feel like you did the other side a disservice here. Many of your summaries of arguments against fertility interventions are decent, but you miss the critical one. How much does this matter? There is something in between human extinction and limitless population growth. If the current demographic crisis continues, the population will certainly fall. But to suggest humans will go extinct is a dramatic over exaggeration. Likely the population will fall a bit and level off around 70-80% of current population.
What's the difference between 6 billion people with really amazing quality of life and 12 billion people with mediocre quality of life because resources are so constrained? At this point, we're getting awfully close to the "repugnant conclusion." When you suggested that social liberals are willing to accept the death of humanity to defend their principles, you really lost me. If the choice was "have 10 babies tomorrow or the humanity disappears," i'd obviously have no qualms about making that my life. But that is absolutely not the decision we face and trying to frame it like that will lead to overpopulation.
Assuming we're able to get over the hump of having a disproportionate elderly population (that's where AI / robotics will help), the remaining people who make up the human population will have much better lives for it.
I expect spending more for fertility will just make it that much more expensive to have kids, without much counterfactual increase in the number of kids. School, and safety-related regulations will just increase. So I don't see why it is a fertility failure. Though I admit there's not enough data on direct cash payment to parents, so not doing any tests there would be a big failure.
Cash payments won’t work well if they’re chasing supply-constrained goods or services. For instance, housing. If you give people money to have more kids and don’t reform permitting and land use, people will mostly bid up housing. So, cash has to be paired with supply side reforms. Those reforms have to guess at what parents need, unfortunately.
Also, shouldn’t we prefer tax credits to cash? Seems better to favor the fertility of high earners and married men.
The same reason that reproduction does not increase to infinity as wealth decreases. People want to maximize their reproductive success. That they switch to a (relative) K-strategy as their wealth increases is no surprise, but zero offspring for anybody is obviously not a successful strategy.
No, I'm saying that you are assuming that it is not. I'm not claiming "this is definitely true." I'm saying you seem to be excluding the possibility without consideration.
I have noticed certain YouTubers claiming I'm a high-value man with body counts in the hundreds, yet he has no offspring. Another very attractive female put in a decade of great effort to trap a basketball star in a pregnancy. She finally succeeded by trapping a guy fresh out of high school. In modernity, this reproductive strategy yields poor to no success at all for so much effort. Some kind of evolutionary mismatch, I think.
Hard to generalize from limited examples. For instance, how does he know that he has no offspring? Birth control fails occasionally, so he should have a couple, even if he doesn't know about them. And with the female, she thought it was worth it to go to great effort to get the genes she wanted. Who's to say she was wrong?
People pursue lots of different strategies. Some work, some don't.
She may have acquired good genes, but her main goal was money. And she may not have gotten all that much out of that, as her marriage to him was very short, only for the purpose of trapping him. A sports star is one injury away from permanent disability, and it happens a lot. Most of these guys end up dead broke. This strategy involves very high promiscuity and no investment in your partner's success. It's a low-birthrate, poverty-producing strategy. A conventional marriage is far superior, in my opinion.
The guy claims to have a lot of money and is public; he would be tracked down if he fathered a child. Some of these guys have had vasectomies; there is no way to know this, of course. And that is a zero-fertility strategy.
Ah. Yes, people pursue varied strategies. Some of them are unsuccessful, of course, but many are not obvious because they are pursuing inclusive fitness, not direct fitness.
You could call it a prosperity-induced fertility collapse. And it seems like we keep finding new ways to accelerate this. Social media and BigTeck seem to be profit-driven accelerators. The effects look like the behavioral sink in John B. Calhoun's mouse experiments. While we are not mice, the similarities are striking.
There are likely multiple combining effects that need to be investigated separately to understand individual effects and it is definitely a human issue, not affecting animals.
What should be looked at in the assessment of risks is the trend, speed of change, and it is consistent, allowing to make reasonable predictions for extinction within 30 years unless handled now.
There should be more posts and information like yours, more research and solid simple individual recommendations for everyone to follow based on that.
Dr. Shanna Swan, who is a reproductive epidemiologist, has much to say about environmental toxins altering male and female reproductive health. These toxins have demasculinizing effects on males, which will affect the social realm in other ways. And as boys and young men rank little concern in the current social zeitgeist, It gets little attention. It is an obvious major issue, and it goes without saying that reproductive rights should include IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), polygenic screening as a mandatory standard of health care. But this is not currently the case. Currently, reproductive rights include free abortions and contraception for all ages. And hormonal contraception is known to precipitate or perpetuate depression, and this can be irreversible when you start young. An added headwind to the social component of low fertility.
Maybe a better way would be to not promote fertility for an extended period of time until there is a great decline in population.
Of course if we do that then the population becomes too aged.
So my first argument is wrong.
However the very problem democracy faces is it predicts democracy is the solution, and then becomes infertilely incapable of predicting psychological change created by social change then sterile. The idea that democracy has changed by giving group x rights and then y more rights has accomplished anything is ridiculous because it has not first predicted and prepared for the consequences of giving group x and then group by the vote. Backlash then is created that is directly responsible for the unprepared community. First we need to prepare society for change by preparing it to understand the very concept of what change is. If people are going to live in a hurricane they need to learn that the hurricane is going to occur and instead being annoyed at the disruption caused by the hurricane but to prepare by being able to utilize the benefits the hurricane brings instead of seeing it as societal disruption.
The society needs to be built around the concept of how to use the hurricane's benefits and not be disturbed by its annoyances.
. The idea of endless sunshine and beaches that is unprepared for the hurricane that doesn't recognize the endless sunshine and beaches are brethren with the hurricane, then creates a "catastrophe" when the hurricane arrives. Instead those wishing to live in the hurricane zone need to be built not around the annoyance of the hurricane but around recognizing their community exists because of the hurricane and the changes that will occur when the hurricane. Instead of trying to rebuild to what was before the hurricane the society will rebuild to what is after the hurricane.
Thus is democracy. If it assumes it is democratic only because it expands rights then it never prepares for the expansion to be a transformation and simply believes it has expanded rights. But it fails when it assumes that expanding rights in a community unprepared for expanding has any value to the community unprepared for its expanding rights in the community. The expansion of rights has to be built on a new societal structure of what it has become after the expansion of rights. It cannot expand rights into what was the society and believe it has accomplished because, like the hurricane, the expansion becomes a catastrophe instead of a benefit to those whose rights have been expanded as well as those unprepared for the expansion.
The idea of democracy, the idea of the environmentalism, are only valid when they recognize the changes that occur require adapting the government or the changing environment to the evolving situation. If we merely think going from one energy to source to another is the solution we are merely rebuilding on the same foundation and will suffer the catastrophe.
When change occurs we should be rebuilding the foundation to adapt to the changes that have occurred. .Otherwise the effects of the catastrophe become increasingly catastrophic, I should think.
“...They do not want to give such enemies the satisfaction of admitting they have a point. They’d rather humanity went extinct, if that’s what it takes, than compromise on any treasured value trends. .”
Ah, my "we're overpopulated and no matter what we do the population will fall to it's equilibrium, so focus on seeingi the right people to the other side of the transition" didn't make it, huh?
"Whenever a for-profit business grants shares to an employee, the business must grant the same number of shares to the employee’s parents, half to each." Doesn't seem promising to me to pay for parenting by taxing firm share issuance.
After my comment below I noticed in other comments of yours that you have indeed suggested ways to fund direct payments to parents. You seem to recommend exempting parents from having to pay taxes, or just direct payments from taxes. Sounds good.
The advantage is that it's directly proportional both to (1) the ability of the economy to make payments, and to (2) the quality and quantity of parenting that the parents contributed. The more children, the more shares. The better the children were raised, the more shares they'll earn and so their parents will earn. I think you're correct that incentivizing parenthood is going to require large direct payments: What is your proposal to fund those payments? What's your alternative?
^^^THIS^^^ Who knows how much of the fertility problem would go away if we just stopped forcing parents to subsidize the retirements of non-parents. You put the time and money into raising 3 productive workers (which really is pretty limited to begin with when you think about them needing to fund social security and medicare for two people) and you get no more benefit in retirement than somebody that didn't raise any children. If you don't raise any children, I'm not really sure what the justification is for getting social security at all. I guess school taxes. Still should be way less than everybody that paid school taxes and paid to raise future taxpayers and paid ~15% of their wage income to pay for the retirements of people older than them.
Thanks Robin. "They are not bothered by people like them having made similar dramatic forecasts for over a century, each time pointing to new never-before-seen machine capabilities". Not a fair comparison. Maybe some people overstated the threat from technology in the past, but with AI very rapidly beating humans at more and more intelligence skills the people around you are making a forecast which is perfectly sensible and in no way over dramatized like some past predictions may have been.
Robin I'm curious you don't see a qualitative difference between a computer robotically executing an instruction set written by humans versus machine learning where a computer teaches itself to play go or write poetry better than humans? If not what would an AI have to do to convince you that It's close to becoming a threat to eclipsing human utility
It not the end of the world, but some places it does not look to good, like China. Japan is in a declining phase. Many countries in Europe will have significant population declines.
In Ukraine millions of childbearing age women have fled and I don't think they are going back. And of course those killed. It's not in the statistics. It's going to be quite a decline I think.
In Poland, where I come from, a few years ago a right wing populist party won the elections partially due to proposing a child subsidy called 500+. At the time it was the highest direct cash child subsidy-per-GDP in the world. While it did push many poor families over the poverty line, the impact on fertility was modest at best.
As a libertarian, I have always been against high taxation and welfare. However the more I think of it, I see no better option that BIG direct cash subsidies - way bigger than 500+/800+(as updated this year) or anything else that has been tried elsewhere.
The root cause of fertility issues is that in WEIRD countries, having (many) children is signalling low status. Single, childless couple = high status. This needs to be flipped. One way the governments could try to accomplish it is with ad campaigns, billboards, propaganda - we all know how poorly this usually works out. But what the government CAN do effectively is tax and redistribute.
Many young middle class people say that they can't afford having children. The subsidy system should be designed such that young people could not afford NOT having children.
People are competing for the same things and having fewer children is seen as a cheap way to boost ones competitive position. All you need to do is make it so having fewer children isn't seen as an easy way to get a leg up.
the biggest problem is that the window of having children is so small (maybe two decades) and badly overlaps with being/becoming adult (mature) enough to be a good parent (two decades minues 5-10 years) and this clashes badly with education required to do anything in a modern economy so one can be materially in a good place to raise children well enough. This is good because it means the means to produce meat waves of soldiers for the glory of psychopathic leaders like Putin... is now past. Fertility extension is a better option to blue sky into being than life extension per se. Bu tmaybe they are linked.
Normally you relish in the nuance of complex topics, but I feel like you did the other side a disservice here. Many of your summaries of arguments against fertility interventions are decent, but you miss the critical one. How much does this matter? There is something in between human extinction and limitless population growth. If the current demographic crisis continues, the population will certainly fall. But to suggest humans will go extinct is a dramatic over exaggeration. Likely the population will fall a bit and level off around 70-80% of current population.
What's the difference between 6 billion people with really amazing quality of life and 12 billion people with mediocre quality of life because resources are so constrained? At this point, we're getting awfully close to the "repugnant conclusion." When you suggested that social liberals are willing to accept the death of humanity to defend their principles, you really lost me. If the choice was "have 10 babies tomorrow or the humanity disappears," i'd obviously have no qualms about making that my life. But that is absolutely not the decision we face and trying to frame it like that will lead to overpopulation.
Assuming we're able to get over the hump of having a disproportionate elderly population (that's where AI / robotics will help), the remaining people who make up the human population will have much better lives for it.
I expect spending more for fertility will just make it that much more expensive to have kids, without much counterfactual increase in the number of kids. School, and safety-related regulations will just increase. So I don't see why it is a fertility failure. Though I admit there's not enough data on direct cash payment to parents, so not doing any tests there would be a big failure.
Cash payments won’t work well if they’re chasing supply-constrained goods or services. For instance, housing. If you give people money to have more kids and don’t reform permitting and land use, people will mostly bid up housing. So, cash has to be paired with supply side reforms. Those reforms have to guess at what parents need, unfortunately.
Also, shouldn’t we prefer tax credits to cash? Seems better to favor the fertility of high earners and married men.
This seems to assume that falling fertility is a bad thing, and not just a natural response to increasing wealth that will level out at some point.
Why would it level out if it is a natural response to increasing wealth?
The same reason that reproduction does not increase to infinity as wealth decreases. People want to maximize their reproductive success. That they switch to a (relative) K-strategy as their wealth increases is no surprise, but zero offspring for anybody is obviously not a successful strategy.
You are assuming human behavior is more optimized for long term reproductive success than it actually is.
Let me put it this way: What makes you think this is *not* the case?
No, I'm saying that you are assuming that it is not. I'm not claiming "this is definitely true." I'm saying you seem to be excluding the possibility without consideration.
I have noticed certain YouTubers claiming I'm a high-value man with body counts in the hundreds, yet he has no offspring. Another very attractive female put in a decade of great effort to trap a basketball star in a pregnancy. She finally succeeded by trapping a guy fresh out of high school. In modernity, this reproductive strategy yields poor to no success at all for so much effort. Some kind of evolutionary mismatch, I think.
Hard to generalize from limited examples. For instance, how does he know that he has no offspring? Birth control fails occasionally, so he should have a couple, even if he doesn't know about them. And with the female, she thought it was worth it to go to great effort to get the genes she wanted. Who's to say she was wrong?
People pursue lots of different strategies. Some work, some don't.
She may have acquired good genes, but her main goal was money. And she may not have gotten all that much out of that, as her marriage to him was very short, only for the purpose of trapping him. A sports star is one injury away from permanent disability, and it happens a lot. Most of these guys end up dead broke. This strategy involves very high promiscuity and no investment in your partner's success. It's a low-birthrate, poverty-producing strategy. A conventional marriage is far superior, in my opinion.
The guy claims to have a lot of money and is public; he would be tracked down if he fathered a child. Some of these guys have had vasectomies; there is no way to know this, of course. And that is a zero-fertility strategy.
Ah. Yes, people pursue varied strategies. Some of them are unsuccessful, of course, but many are not obvious because they are pursuing inclusive fitness, not direct fitness.
You could call it a prosperity-induced fertility collapse. And it seems like we keep finding new ways to accelerate this. Social media and BigTeck seem to be profit-driven accelerators. The effects look like the behavioral sink in John B. Calhoun's mouse experiments. While we are not mice, the similarities are striking.
Thank you for raising awareness on the issue.
There are likely multiple combining effects that need to be investigated separately to understand individual effects and it is definitely a human issue, not affecting animals.
What should be looked at in the assessment of risks is the trend, speed of change, and it is consistent, allowing to make reasonable predictions for extinction within 30 years unless handled now.
There should be more posts and information like yours, more research and solid simple individual recommendations for everyone to follow based on that.
There are more details on https://archive.md/ScgMy#selection-1301.0-1365.132, taken from https://twitter.com/OwenGregorian/status/1747628014513365385
Dr. Shanna Swan, who is a reproductive epidemiologist, has much to say about environmental toxins altering male and female reproductive health. These toxins have demasculinizing effects on males, which will affect the social realm in other ways. And as boys and young men rank little concern in the current social zeitgeist, It gets little attention. It is an obvious major issue, and it goes without saying that reproductive rights should include IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), polygenic screening as a mandatory standard of health care. But this is not currently the case. Currently, reproductive rights include free abortions and contraception for all ages. And hormonal contraception is known to precipitate or perpetuate depression, and this can be irreversible when you start young. An added headwind to the social component of low fertility.
https://www.shannaswan.com/
Maybe a better way would be to not promote fertility for an extended period of time until there is a great decline in population.
Of course if we do that then the population becomes too aged.
So my first argument is wrong.
However the very problem democracy faces is it predicts democracy is the solution, and then becomes infertilely incapable of predicting psychological change created by social change then sterile. The idea that democracy has changed by giving group x rights and then y more rights has accomplished anything is ridiculous because it has not first predicted and prepared for the consequences of giving group x and then group by the vote. Backlash then is created that is directly responsible for the unprepared community. First we need to prepare society for change by preparing it to understand the very concept of what change is. If people are going to live in a hurricane they need to learn that the hurricane is going to occur and instead being annoyed at the disruption caused by the hurricane but to prepare by being able to utilize the benefits the hurricane brings instead of seeing it as societal disruption.
The society needs to be built around the concept of how to use the hurricane's benefits and not be disturbed by its annoyances.
. The idea of endless sunshine and beaches that is unprepared for the hurricane that doesn't recognize the endless sunshine and beaches are brethren with the hurricane, then creates a "catastrophe" when the hurricane arrives. Instead those wishing to live in the hurricane zone need to be built not around the annoyance of the hurricane but around recognizing their community exists because of the hurricane and the changes that will occur when the hurricane. Instead of trying to rebuild to what was before the hurricane the society will rebuild to what is after the hurricane.
Thus is democracy. If it assumes it is democratic only because it expands rights then it never prepares for the expansion to be a transformation and simply believes it has expanded rights. But it fails when it assumes that expanding rights in a community unprepared for expanding has any value to the community unprepared for its expanding rights in the community. The expansion of rights has to be built on a new societal structure of what it has become after the expansion of rights. It cannot expand rights into what was the society and believe it has accomplished because, like the hurricane, the expansion becomes a catastrophe instead of a benefit to those whose rights have been expanded as well as those unprepared for the expansion.
The idea of democracy, the idea of the environmentalism, are only valid when they recognize the changes that occur require adapting the government or the changing environment to the evolving situation. If we merely think going from one energy to source to another is the solution we are merely rebuilding on the same foundation and will suffer the catastrophe.
When change occurs we should be rebuilding the foundation to adapt to the changes that have occurred. .Otherwise the effects of the catastrophe become increasingly catastrophic, I should think.
When losing becomes winning.
“...They do not want to give such enemies the satisfaction of admitting they have a point. They’d rather humanity went extinct, if that’s what it takes, than compromise on any treasured value trends. .”
I’m surprised you don’t have a complex liability and insurance scheme against childlessness instead?
Ah, my "we're overpopulated and no matter what we do the population will fall to it's equilibrium, so focus on seeingi the right people to the other side of the transition" didn't make it, huh?
Here's a novel idea to get the money to make direct payments to parents: https://medium.com/non-violence/stakeholder-control-compensating-parents-for-their-sacrifices-to-prevent-extinction-of-258bd3d8f3aa
"Whenever a for-profit business grants shares to an employee, the business must grant the same number of shares to the employee’s parents, half to each." Doesn't seem promising to me to pay for parenting by taxing firm share issuance.
After my comment below I noticed in other comments of yours that you have indeed suggested ways to fund direct payments to parents. You seem to recommend exempting parents from having to pay taxes, or just direct payments from taxes. Sounds good.
The advantage is that it's directly proportional both to (1) the ability of the economy to make payments, and to (2) the quality and quantity of parenting that the parents contributed. The more children, the more shares. The better the children were raised, the more shares they'll earn and so their parents will earn. I think you're correct that incentivizing parenthood is going to require large direct payments: What is your proposal to fund those payments? What's your alternative?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/20/the-return-of-patriarchy/
Fertility is a self-correcting problem. Liberals who do not want children will be supplanted by the religious conservatives who do.
No, the left will tax other peoples children in ever greater amounts to pay for old age retirements.
It will also import low IQ foreigners to boost its electoral outcomes, but this will further erode the fiscal situation.
^^^THIS^^^ Who knows how much of the fertility problem would go away if we just stopped forcing parents to subsidize the retirements of non-parents. You put the time and money into raising 3 productive workers (which really is pretty limited to begin with when you think about them needing to fund social security and medicare for two people) and you get no more benefit in retirement than somebody that didn't raise any children. If you don't raise any children, I'm not really sure what the justification is for getting social security at all. I guess school taxes. Still should be way less than everybody that paid school taxes and paid to raise future taxpayers and paid ~15% of their wage income to pay for the retirements of people older than them.
Thanks Robin. "They are not bothered by people like them having made similar dramatic forecasts for over a century, each time pointing to new never-before-seen machine capabilities". Not a fair comparison. Maybe some people overstated the threat from technology in the past, but with AI very rapidly beating humans at more and more intelligence skills the people around you are making a forecast which is perfectly sensible and in no way over dramatized like some past predictions may have been.
"with AI very rapidly beating humans at more and more intelligence skills" but that statement has been true for a century.
Robin I'm curious you don't see a qualitative difference between a computer robotically executing an instruction set written by humans versus machine learning where a computer teaches itself to play go or write poetry better than humans? If not what would an AI have to do to convince you that It's close to becoming a threat to eclipsing human utility
It not the end of the world, but some places it does not look to good, like China. Japan is in a declining phase. Many countries in Europe will have significant population declines.
In Ukraine millions of childbearing age women have fled and I don't think they are going back. And of course those killed. It's not in the statistics. It's going to be quite a decline I think.
Population Forecasting Charts
https://www.healthdata.org/data-tools-practices/interactive-visuals/population-forecasting