back
33 comments
> With the Industrial Revolution, according to Galor, the value of human capital reached the point that parents chose to have fewer children and invest more in their upbringing. Longer life spans made human capital even more important. As women’s wages began to approach those earned by men, it became more costly for them to leave the workforce to have children, further reducing birthrates. This demographic transition allowed technological progress to vastly outstrip population growth, producing our present world of material plenty.

I wonder if some of this is the demographic equivalent of having a fantastic time feasting on your seed corn. IIRC, pretty much all these populations are at sub-replacement level, and some by quite a significant amount.

> feasting on your seed corn

Assuming the ratio of the average salary to the average pension in my country stays the same, and that I will work for 40 years and retire for 10 (which is the expected case in Romania, but I expect I'll live longer), the return of the national pension fund is -78.6% of what I contribute.

There's no way I will get a meaningful pension, especially given the fact that the country is undergoing depopulation. I have to manage my own wealth.

If you tax billionaires, you can have a pension.
There's a handful of Romanian billionaires. There are millions of retirees.

This translates to thousands of dollars per retiree. Not enough even if we tax all their wealth.

I don't think there is anything particularly new in that. For most of human history, cities relied on migration to maintain population levels. Both because cities were so unhealthy places to live in and because people had better things to do.
Yup. I've said in other places that people who can have kids but don't probably shouldn't get social security.
> Yup. I've said in other places that people who can have kids but don't probably shouldn't get social security.

And you also said that such people shouldn't pay social security either, right?

Moreover, they get a refund (with interest) for past payments when the determination is made.

No. By not having kids you save a lot of time and money that should have gone into the future. That's your refund.
So, you want me to pay for my own retirement AND subsidize yours?

And before you say "but you'll be relying on my kids", I'll be PAYING for my retirement. Just like you.

The difference is that you think that you're entitled to my money to do so.

Yeah that's part of living in civilization. If you don't like it you can go live in Somalia. An alternative would be to just get rid of social security but that seems pretty unpopular. If you're going to have socialism you have to think through the issues like this.
Paying for you is part of civilization?

Why isn't paying for ME part of civilization?

Do you really want to claim that this is socialism?

> "With the Industrial Revolution, according to Galor, the value of human capital reached the point that parents chose to have fewer children and invest more in their upbringing."

Parents didn't "choose" to have fewer kids. The leaders of industrialized/industrializing nations encouraged/demanded/brainwashed people into having less children - both foreign and domestic. I guess being forced or brainwashed into having fewer kids is the saming thing as "choosing".

It isn't that parents chose to have fewer kids and invest more in their upbringing. It's that the elites wanted fewer children so that parents could spend more time at work making more money for them. It's about extracting the most value from a population.

Of course the flip side is eugenics. Where we encourage/fund/order the third world countries to have less children. The first major experiment was in hong kong where the british founded the eugenics league in the 1930s and encouraged a 2 child policy on the chinese people there.

It's also worth noting that the incentives and economics for having kids have changed in other ways.

Having kids is a privatized loss with socialized gains. The parent is responsible for the costs. Even if one walks away, they are on the hook for 20% of their gross to pay for the upbringing.

Socialized gains: everyone benefits from the tax the child pays after the parents finish raising the child. Many elderly and disabled benefit from the social security the tax the child will pay after they're raised. These recipients of social welfare benefit whether they had children themselves or not.

It's a massive personal investment, and then once the child is an adult society taps the child as their tax piggy bank, with only the smallest tax offsets to the parent for raising the child. Counter this with the ways of old, where the child's contribution to the elderly was generally done through the family structure rather than through compelled taxes to general public elderly via social security, even those who didn't raise children.

This incentive structure means the childless disproportionately benefit from the socialized gains and those with many children, assuming they raised them without welfare, almost assuredly disproportionately do not recoup the socialized gains after subtracting the personal losses.

The stakes have gone up as well. CPS, child welfare laws, nosy neighbors, and all manner of other much stricter enforcement have emerged in the past 50 years. Before you could let your child play out on the street alone if they were ready at age, say 7. Now if you do that in the wrong place, many people will call CPS, at no risk to themselves and in fact in an extreme act of unconstitutional perversion you are not allowed to face your accuser who are protected as 'anonymous'. Many people are looking to crucify the parent they see making any perceived error, and the state apparatus has been vastly expanded to rush down and 'save the children' and destroy you in the process. This enforced coddling of children from every perceived outdoor 'danger' destroys the development of the child and improperly robs the parent of the ability to focus on other tasks, further yet destroying the will of the parent to make the mistake of raising another child.

Note: there are some caveats to this: obviously the childless pay higher taxes and also K-12 is partially publicly funded, but these only damper the effects.

The change has been stronger in the US than in Europe. While having kids is also a net economic loss in Europe, European countries tend to spend more public money on funding things like parental leaves, childcare, and education. I don't know if that has any significant effect on birth rates.

Socialized gains apply to the entire economic contribution of the child, not only to the part that is paid as taxes. Your private retirement savings are worth something only because other people continue working and producing things.

> European countries tend to spend more public money on funding things like parental leaves, childcare, and education. I don't know if that has any significant effect on birth rates.

Yes, stronger social support networks consistently produce lower birthrates. A reason which has been suggested for this is that without such programs, children serve as a kind of safety net, in that familial bonds mean that a sufficient number of them means the parents (and siblings) are more likely to have support if they become unable to support themselves or have temporarily greater support needs. Where there is a strong public support system, this is less necessary.

Does that mean that the childless should deserve no social welfare?
> Technological innovation caused increases in food production, which caused higher population growth — until the additional mouths to feed canceled out the productivity gains, bringing living standards back to subsistence levels.

Is this accurate? My understanding was that the cap on human population levels had more to do with survival rate of childhood for which nutrition is only one of many factors. Didn't we see a larger increase in population due to advances in medicine eliminating many childhood diseases? I'd say that this reasoning is rather tenuous, if food production were the only limit on population growth then we should have seen booms in population level with each agricultural advance rather than the slow, linear increase up until the industrial revolution.

> the value of human capital reached the point that parents chose to have fewer children and invest more in their upbringing

This also seems to run counter to evidence from currently industrializing societies where reduction in infant mortality and increases in education are the big drivers of dropping fertility rates. It isn't that they see more value in their children, it's that they aren't dropping like flies so you don't need to have 8 kids just to make sure 2 make it to adulthood and can help support you as you get older.

> Because a subset of a group is likely to be less diverse than the whole group, populations became more homogeneous the farther they traveled

This is just lack of genetic diversity and I don't see what it has to do with the following sentence

> diversity can inhibit economic growth by decreasing social cohesion, but it can also increase growth by promoting specialization and innovation

because that kind of diversity has more to do with appearance, language, culture, religion, etc. than it does with genetics, physical appearance being the only one of that mix that is determined by genetics.

> In Galor’s account, Europe escaped the poverty trap in the 19th century because of increased investment in education and the decline of the gender wage gap.

This is the first I've heard of it.

How would one explain triple the population size in India and China in comparison to the US and Europe?

The answer is not less infant mortality. The answer is rice, versus potatoes/wheat. You can harvest rice 3 to 4 times per year versus just once per year for potatos. And rice doesn't grow in Europe, it doesn't have the climate.

Maybe you have different numbers than I can find but all of the graphs of population growth show pretty much the same thing for India or China as they do for other countries: an almost flat increasing trend that hockey-sticks as soon as the country modernizes and then begins to level off or decrease as education catches up. The historical population of India seems large until you consider that the subcontinent is the size of Europe and then factor in the earlier start they had compared to Europe and there's no mystery left.
> The answer is rice, versus potatoes/wheat. […] And rice doesn't grow in Europe, it doesn't have the climate.

Perhaps the answer then is "climate" and not any particular foodstuff.

Artificial nitrogen fixation is what caused the population boom after the 19th century. It's also arguably one of the primary causes for the first World War.
yeah, the article is full of de rigueur dogma & talking points, so much so that it verges on word salad
I stopped reading about three quarters of the way through, it seemed to be so much drivel. It seemed to be dangerously verging on "14 words" nonsense. Hyper concerned as it was about women earning a paycheck instead of making babies and declining birth rates in genetically homogeneous regions.
>it seemed to be so much drivel. It seemed to be dangerously verging on "14 words"

Blithely dismissing cultural practices which may lead to successful and flourishing societies merely because some of them also happen to be espoused by white supremacists is more dangerous.

Sure, next time I'll really pay attention to white supremacists because they might have really good ideas on how to organize society. /s
>According to Galor, diversity can inhibit economic growth by decreasing social cohesion

Surprised to see this acknowledged on Washington Post.

>migration distance, geography, disease, culture and political institutions.

It's a shame that modern anthropology is dead set on downplaying the influence of culture and politics on national success. I think part of the push back against the horrors of WWII has manifested as an overly anti-nationalistic slant among our institutions, at the cost of objectivity in social sciences, among other casualties.

>>According to Galor, diversity can inhibit economic growth by decreasing social cohesion

>Surprised to see this acknowledged on Washington Post.

Agreed, but it is argued as an aspect of an average: "According to Galor, diversity can inhibit economic growth by decreasing social cohesion, but it can also increase growth by promoting specialization and innovation; therefore, regions with an intermediate level of diversity had the highest levels of economic development."

Don’t political scientists study those questions? Social capital and trust, rule of law, comparative analysis of institutions are some things I know social scientists study.

Anthropologists probably avoid analyzing the causality between culture and national success for the same reasons historians de-emphasize it. It’s an impossible dimension to tease out. Countries don’t exist in cultural silos untethered from history, geography, and foreign relations.

If anything the first is the flawed approach. The models that come out of it frequently fail to capture the complexity of reality. And that’s why so many data informed policy interventions fail.

And on the topic of applied social science. I don’t think attributing success to culture would even be useful because a culture in one place (or time) can be successful, but would be disastrous in other contexts.

On a personal level I would be distrustful of any attempts of the government to optimize culture. Culture is not the domain of Caesar.

yeah, it could be said that much of science has been tainted and even crippled by mandatory adherence to certain dogma/narrative talking points
I assume that diversity here means when you have rival cultures in proximity to each other you are actually at war all the time, and your people are fighting and dying instead of growing in peace and property.

You have to spend time making armies instead of houses.

Having played a lot of Civ, I can only assume that's what he means.

>playing Civ instead of Europa Universalis and thinking you understand geopolitics