Fertility as Metascience

All models are wrong. Some are useful.<p>We are in new territory. With 8 billion people, a global internet, climate change, etc. this is a scenario we haven&#x27;t seen before.<p>I am skeptical that it is helpful to make sweeping pronouncements of this sort.<p>Some countries have high rates of disease and low levels of education. I bet getting people healthier and better educated would improve productivity more than having more children.<p>We also don&#x27;t necessarily know how more people raises GDP per capita. Maybe it&#x27;s a situation where having basics in place fosters more people who are healthier or something and maybe in some countries that pattern is not what&#x27;s happening.

I don&#x27;t think everyone should have bunch of kids. However, if you are in a good relationship and both like having kids, think about having 5 instead of 2. My personal experience of having 5+ kids is that the difficulty mostly scales logarithmically, meaning kid 1 is a lot of work, kid 2 is a lot more work, but kid 3 more (but less more) work.<p>The social dynamics can really work well. Kids can be less work when they can entertain each other. Add some homeschooling, work from home, and creative projects and it makes life really fulfilling.<p>YMMMV, but it&#x27;s a valid and reasonable way to live for some.

If those models are true, then most of economists&#x27; prescriptions (deregulation, taxation) are useless. It&#x27;s population growth that dictates economic growth.<p>Wonder if their models integrate the fact the Earth is finite...

As long as these f*** i**s don&#x27;t plausibly explain to me at what point we&#x27;re supposed to stop with demographic and economic growth it&#x27;s just a lot of hogwash, misguided at best.<p>We&#x27;re living on a finite planet with finite resources; our collective metabolism has been producing greenhouse gases at exponentially increasing levels for the past 200 years and shows no signs of slowing down, even though the population growth has somewhat slowed down.<p>There&#x27;s nothing, nothing in the books that tells us that even when populations should start to shrink globally, they won&#x27;t go on to continue increasing their GHG outputs, for the simple reason that there are still sizable demographics who will want to attain a higher level of living i.e. a higher level of industrial products consumption.<p>A massively decreasing global population is one of the key factors for a livable future. Another one is stopping to believe that electric cars are doing any good or that we&#x27;ll ever be able to &#x27;just&#x27; suck the CO2 out of the air and dispose of it underground. A third inevitable step must be a reduction of energy and product consumption on part of those who are responsible for major parts of the global figures; that would include many people in the West.

I find it pretty hard to get alarmed about the impacts of declining population when my family and I have spent the 2019 summer on the run from a raging bushfire, and a few years later, I watched my neighbouring suburbs get washed away in the 2nd once-in-a-century flood we&#x27;ve had in a decade.<p>Sorry, but I think the world needs fewer people right now, and I&#x27;m doing my bit to help.

Elon has a similar take on the importance of fertility. Both him and TFA focus on the upside of more humans and not the downside. For every human capable of advancing science, or even just engineering in one of the increasingly specialized industries, there will be a hundred humans who cannot. And this ratio only gets worse as we go.<p>Those who cannot will have to work in the shrinking market for manual labor or non-innovative white collar work. As scientific progress accelerates, the number of these jobs goes to zero.<p>Just attacking the problem with quantity of scientific minds creates a byproduct of excess suffering in the form of &quot;waste&quot; humans. Losers of the same genetic lottery that is creating the precious scientific minds that we can&#x27;t get enough of.

We don’t need more growth. Japan is still Japanese and Japan is fine. The owners on Wall Street might, but the average wagie doesn&#x27;t.

Tabarrok is not a common family name. I wonder if Maxwell is related to Alex, also an economist.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Human_overpopulation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Human_overpopulation</a>

&gt;Reallocating people across the world is the right thing to do but it probably quickens the global demographic transition.<p>Is this some Soviet propaganda piece? &quot;Reallocating&quot; people is the <i>right</i> thing to do? Seriously? Rhetoric like this is part of why globalism was finally rejected over the past several years.<p>I don&#x27;t disagree that a growing population is crucial to growing an economy, but the narrative the author advocates is asinine.

Welcome to correlation vs causation 101.<p>Could it be that the growth of the population and the GDP has a common cause like advances in technology and medicine?<p>Why is the conclusion of the article more kids equals higher GDP and not the other way around.

Having children is a nightmare.<p>Employers (especially in tech) actively discriminate.<p>People talk about ageism etc, but the discrimination against parents is real.