Having children is the ultimate vote
of confidence in the future It's you really believe in what your
opportunities are going to be going forward, you're very certain about
what your future looks like. In this quarantine time, that's the last
thing that we can say. Mothers typically talk about the more children
you had is bad for their pocketbook. What we learned from the
Great Recession is that every one percentage point increase and the unemployment
rate reduces births by one percent. Despite speculation of a surge
in quarantine babies, the U.S. fertility rate is actually shrinking and
has been for a while. Births have been falling for the last
almost 15 years now, at this point. Millennials have less financial confidence
than the generation before us. Living through our second once in
a lifetime recession has made big financial decisions like providing for and
creating a brand new human, like my niece here
Sydney, quite difficult. Listen I've got two little kids,
so I'm pretty concerned for them. Plus, there's a prevailing ideology that large
families are a drain on the environment. The costs of ongoing
economic growth, as it's currently designed, are causing damage
to planet and people. Meanwhile, baby boomers are retiring and
aging out of the system. If you have an economy that since the
end of the Second World War has grown based on consumerism, what happens when
all your consumers are old and they have everything they want? So is the US running out of people? And what impact does population
size have on the economy? To maintain the current population size, every
woman would need to have two point one children. This is known as
the rate of replacement. And the point one is because not
everyone goes on to have children themselves and there's
some child mortality. In the United States the total fertility
rate, that measure is now around one point seven. The total fertility or
birth rate refers to the actual number of children each
woman is having. Currently, there are nearly seven point
eight billion people in the world, over three hundred and thirty
million in the US. Through fertility alone, we would expect
our population to start to decline if that rate is sustained
for a very long period. People think, for example, that
fertility is out of control. Well, the truth is it isn't. I mean, if you take a look,
particularly at millennial fertility in the United States, it's down to one now. The American birthrate is well below
replacement rate and continuing to decline. Although declining fertility rates can
be a leading indicator for a recession, it is more often
correlated with increased education and opportunities for women. But female workers add a
lot to the bottom line. According to one study, if women entered
and stayed in the US workforce at the same rate as they
do in Norway, the U.S. economy would be one point
six trillion dollars larger. American women now are having
fewer children than our mothers. In twenty twenty, the birth rate dropped
to its lowest level in thirty five years. There's also been a huge
decline in teenage births in the US. What's clear is that there are
less unintentional births than ever before. In addition to the decline that we've
been seeing in fertility, there is another trend that's happening underneath that,
which is an increasing age at birth. It's more like in the
late 20s or 30s or something. Now, compared to during the baby
boom, it would have been 20. It used to be, you know, uncommon
to see a 40 something year old woman who is
now planning a pregnancy. Now, that seems almost at
least for us, a norm. Women have changed the lives
that they want to live. When they have more of a decision to
make about the type of family they're the more empowered to make, the kind
of decision they want to make about their family. And when they make that
decision, not for everybody, but for most people, it's fewer kids. So women are waiting to have their
first child longer and then their subsequent children. What's sort of remains to
be seen in this area is the extent to which the decline in fertility
that we're seeing is really a delay of births so that these declines
for women in their teens and early 20s will be made up later when they're
in their 30s or whether this is a permanent reduction in
their lifetime fertility. The pandemic may have accelerated this trend
as people are less likely to have babies in
uncertain financial times. That might mean less American
born workers, consumers and students. However, that could work out well for
babies like Sydney when she applies for a job in 20 years. At the end of the day, the
fewer people you're competing with, the easier things are for you. There is that in terms of the upside,
but, you know, I mean, who knows, maybe one of the kids that isn't born
is going to cure cancer, would have cured cancer. Population size and fertility
rates should inform how we plan for the future and how
we think about social programs. For example, if there are less younger
workers able to pay into Social Security the way it is currently set up,
the funds will run out in my lifetime. So in particular, you hear
people talk a lot about Social Security. That's a system where
current workers support current retirees. And so as the population ages, we
have more retirees but fewer births. People are worried that that system
is not going to be sustainable. And there are other programs
that face that challenge. There are also concerns
about economic growth. You know, to continue to grow,
we need innovators, inventors, workers. And as we have fewer children, we
will have fewer of those those inputs into economic growth. But that actually has important implications
even before you get to that. I mean, like if we have, you know,
a birth decline now means five years from now, it's probably is not the
great time to be thinking about school construction for instance. I worry about people who would love to
bring kids into the world, but just feel like they can't that the costs are
too high or that they don't feel good enough about their economic security,
their economic futures to be able to make that decision. If you really thought about what was
happening in terms of our population and what it looked like going forward,
you change the way that you ask, even ask questions about what the
future economy is going to be. So as we have workers who are
more productive, then you can sustain more retirees for individual for
each individual worker. Japan, which has had a falling birthrate
for years, is a leader in innovation. Japan is when it comes
to things like fertility and aging is the canary in the coal mine for all
of us, the median age of Japan is 48 now. Their birth rate is down
around one point for one point five, and they lose approximately four
hundred thousand people from the population every year. So what's the solution in Japan? Robots, if you want to talk about
industrial robots or robots of any type, they're looking at all
those types of solutions. Why? It's not it's you know, it
might make for interesting science fiction or whatever. We might think.
It's just a peculiar thing. But the truth is, it's a necessity. It can't be anything but bad. And the reason that it's going to be
bad is because robots don't buy don't buy new outfits. They don't buy cars. They don't they they
don't buy things. They're not consumers. They can help
your productivity, but they can't help they can't help
the consumer situation. You know, at the end
of the day, people matter. So the more people there are,
the more economic activity there is. If the main economic concern is
finding new consumers, adjusting our interpretation of who the
consumer is can help. For example, we can shift our
focus to the aging population. So economic growth is generated by
people who are, you know, typically something like 16 to 60
in their prime working years. And if you ever if you get it shifted
toward the top so that you have more retirees, as is happening right now
with the baby boom generation entering into that phase, or you have fewer at
the bottom that are going to be future workers, then that
upsets that balance. Now, I think what some people are worried
about is that we may have both of those things happening
at the same time. So one of the biggest challenges that we've
got going forward is to how how we can trigger that the generational
transfer of funds from the older population by turning
them into consumers. The way we think about generational transfer
of funds as we think about my mom and dad willingness, the money,
what we need it faster. One of the biggest prejudices that
we have in terms of looking at the economy, because we only
see old people as consumers. They're sitting on all the best
houses, they have all the money. They have all the
pensions, they have everything. The single biggest power group in
the economy going forward are older women because there's a lot of
them and there's more every day. Women outlive men. There are always more boys, boys than
girls in every country except where there's an artificial
artificial intervention. But by the age of 30, in
most developed countries, there's more women than men and then every year after that. So it's not that old women
outlive old men, which they do. It's that women outlive men at every
age category, once we get to mid-age. The U.S. can look beyond our
borders for more consumers and workers. The easiest way to manipulate the
size of the population is through migration, immigration. I think it's important to point out that
more babies is not the only way out of those problems. So immigration is an obvious way where
we can continue to grow our population. First of all,
immigration policies work instantly. You want another twenty
five year old worker? You bring in
another 25-year-old worker. Fertility pro-natailist fertility policies are
about, you know, 20 years from now. And frankly, for the history
of the United States, it's been the huge American advantage. It still has the shining city on the
hill for most people in the world if they're going to immigrate. And we do
surveys that have where I see this, the most popular place for people to
immigrate in the world is still the United States. There are still a lot of
people out there looking for a new country to call home. The UNHCR estimates there were
seventy-nine point five million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the
end of twenty nineteen. Forty percent of those were children. There are also twenty-six million refugees,
half of whom are children. What we're particularly concerned about is
that every country in the world, wherever possible, can enable people to
move to their countries and in particular can absorb
refugees and asylum seekers. We have to retain
that compassionate capacity. Many of those displacements are occurring
because of drastic changes in the environment. The World Bank estimates that
by 2050 there will be one hundred and forty three million
additional climate migrants from just Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa
and Southeast Asia. So there won't be a
deficit any time soon. Since the publication of the
population bomb in 1968. There's been a prevailing ideology that
the world is facing a dire overpopulation problem. That's not true. At the moment with
seven point eight billion and counting people on the planet, we are
stretching the carrying capacity of the planet. We know that we're
breaching certain boundaries, whether it's climate, whether it's marine fisheries,
whether it's fresh water, et cetera, et cetera. Experts worry that
the planet has reached its so-called carrying capacity or the total amount
of people the earth can sustain. If you think about the global
population, there are projections that suggest the world is going to reach
its max capacity sometimes within the next 100 years. And that's because while fertility is
below replacement rate within the US and other developed countries,
it is not elsewhere. So on net, we expect to see the
world population to continue to grow for the next several decades. But we do know that at
the moment we're overstressing our planet. And we also know that people want
to choose to have smaller families when they have the ability, when they have
the access and the choice, and therefore we can make positive progressive moves
to take the heat off the planet, particularly in terms
of climate change. Project drawdown ranks family planning and
educating girls in its top 10 solutions to climate change. Remember, though, that people in
developed nations consume more renewable resources than those
in developing nations. The Global Footprint Network estimates that if
all the people on the earth consumed as much as Americans do, we
would need 500 percent of the Earth's natural resources to
sustain the population. For comparison, they estimate that if
everyone used renewable resources at the same rate as those in India, we
would only be using 70 percent of one Earth's renewable resources. But, you know, we see as
countries develop, fertility tends to decline. And so we expect as development spreads
around the world that that will happen. And that's why we project
that actually populations will start to decline around the world sometime
within the next hundred years. Global population is expected to peak at
nine point seven billion by twenty sixty four and then fall back down
to eight point eight billion by 2100. And Bangladesh would be a good
example where through voluntary means without coercion, working at the
community level through women's groups, they reduced their fertility rate from seven
to eight kids per woman in the 70s and 80s, down to
two-point two to near replacement now. And that's had a
really beneficial effect. The women have become
more economically active. They're doing stuff
in that community. They're able to make choices. They've taken the pressure
off that environment. And if you're thinking that the population is
going to be 11 billion or 10 billion people by the end of the
century, you've got real concerns about that. But what if I told you that
the population was probably going to be the same as it is
today or maybe even smaller? And if we're carrying the population
that we already have and technology is going to continue to improve
from everything from agriculture to cleaning on our environment to
transportation, everything that you can imagine, then by the end of the
century, I think problem probably going to be OK.
Is The U.S. Running Out Of ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶? wage slaves? is the title they should have used.
At 6:50 Darrell Bricker, CEO Public Affairs Ipsos, makes a logical fallacy. [I also don't know why we are supposed to give a shit what a CEO has to say about this. He's about as qualified as Ja Rule.]
Think about how twisted up your economic philosophy must be in order for the lack of consumption to be a problem despite more stuff than ever existing. Consuming things is taking something of value, and reducing its value. It is destruction by definition. We could mandate that one in every 10 ocean traversing shipments must be sunk. That would accomplish the same thing. But obviously that's a terrible idea.
The fact that there aren't consumers isn't a problem. The problem is all this generated wealth is being allowed to accumulate by the owner class. There are plenty of mouths. The fact that there is too much food and not enough mouths is not a problem. If somehow we end up with too much stuff then let the individuals that do exist consume more.
Yup, no kids. We have to starve the beast of consumerism by not birthing more wage slaves for capitalism.
We're getting to that part in the simcity game where you start to realize all those factories are not sustainable.
our native birth rate was in decline for ages, its part of advanced society too, but our population was kept above the decline by..get this, teen pregnancy and immigration.
They don't need people anymore, they'll have their automation and soon robots and machines will make their food, their houses, their cars, fight their wars... they don't even need consumers with money anymore as they have proven that the financial system provides them with all the money printing, perks and wealth that they want, like mana from heaven, it's a sad state of affairs. They'll also make it impossible for anyone to abandon their cities and settle in rural areas.