The Giant Basket Case Countries
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Country Comparisons
The article discusses large countries that are struggling economically, prompting discussion on the challenges of development and the role of globalization.
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Having kids is expensive and for many people of reproductive age there's the additional concern of bringing a child into a world in crisis. I believe that all these problems are technically solvable but are not politically palatable.
The simplest thing that we could do would be to subsidize childcare so that the biggest economic hurdle would be addressed. But again, that would be dismissed as socialism and would be a non-starter today.
In the second view, they have actually slightly increased fertility (and only temporarily). But at what cost? No one refuses to believe that it's impossible to bribe someone to have a child they wouldn't otherwise have anyway. If you offered $1 billion in cash, up front, you'd probably have riots of women trying to sign up for it. But this is ultimately unaffordable is it not? If the US needs 500,000 extra births next year, we can't afford $500 trillion for that, and not when we need as many the year after, and the year after that. It doesn't become more tractable by reducing the bribe, you get far few takers (which is why they've only managed to slightly raise fertility rates so far, they offered far too little).
Whichever of these possibilities happens to be the truth, neither bodes well. Government doesn't have any levers that it can pull to meaningfully change this.
And yet the US is spending money to deport people. How this plays out over the next few decades is going to be grim.
If the US citizens are slowly going extinct, why would we want to import foreigners? Aren't we simply giving our country away at that point?
If you let in people with the skills you want isn’t it mutually beneficial?
No. If a person can decide for themselves what they want (what benefits them), then I decide that I do not what that, and it is therefor not mutually beneficial. If you have some alternate theory of objective benefice, I'll hear it, but it seems you only assume such exists.
What’s the issue? America appears to be on a different path.
This is because, in your head, people exist to serve their governments, and if governments didn't need people at all then there should be no people.
In mine, governments exist to serve the people, and if the people don't need a government, then there should be no government.
I don't give a shit what the government wants. It's about what I want, and other people like me want. And we don't want what's under discussion.
Daycare is significant financial burden: https://blog.dol.gov/2024/11/19/new-data-childcare-costs-rem...
Of course the expected response is "that's the mother's job" but millions of families need both parents working to get by.
This seems logical, but to my knowledge there are no successful examples of pro-natalist policies (nordic countries, russia, south korea, etc.).
Obviously looking for existing patterns of success to validate assumptions is a reasonable ask, but it doesn't mean we couldn't forge new ones with proper diligence.
It would be expensive but an investment in the people that would pay huge dividends. Safeguards from fraud and abuse would be required but these are technical problems and are solvable. The only hurdle is consensus.
They implemented similar policies to those you quoted above.
I don't understand this view.
If you think it is net negative for a child to be born in this world then isn't it also net negative for you to continue in this world?
Yet people will continue living their own life while talking about how they don't think it's fair to have a child.
If your life is worth living despite the supposed world in crisis (as if there is any other kind) who are you to say somebody else's wouldn't be?
> isn't it also net negative for you to continue in this world?
Careful here. Whether you intended to or not, my interpretation of what you said is "if you don't think it's right to bring a child into this world, then you should consider suicide".
> Yet people will continue living their own life while talking about how they don't think it's fair to have a child.
No, this is not what childfree folks say. We do not want kids, we do not care what you do.
The point about suicide is approximately what I meant, although of course I do not intend to drive anyone to suicide, only to help them see that their preference to live would also be shared by a hypothetical child.
If your revealed preference is to exist rather than not to exist in this "world in crisis", why would you not afford a hypothetical child the same courtesy?
In contrast a hypothetical child is both unkickable and unable to express a sentiment.
Unless your position is that every sperm is sacred and all wrigglers must strive to leave no egg unfertilised thus maximising a birth rate at greater than ten babies per woman I fear that you also fail to uphold the existence of every hypothetical child.
I'm not saying you should have the maximum possible number of children, or any children at all. It's up to you.
What I'm saying is that "world in crisis" is not a good reason for you to reduce the number of children you plan to have, if your personal preference is in fact to continue living in this "world in crisis" yourself.
I would suggest you have a poor grasp of the timescale of the "world in crisis" then.
The AGW threat, as put forward in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports is a slow boiling frog scenario, one that steadily gets worse as insulation in the atmosphere continues to increase.
A number of people may, and indeed do, consider that their lives from this time until their projected death assuming good health, will be pleasant enough, but that the lives of their children and potential grandchildren will be worse and might face a rapid decline in quality of life at some point.
Another group, with some overlap in the greater Venn diagram, might consider that one part of a solution includes decreasing overall consumption - and a reduction of numbers in high per capita consumption societies makes sense.
The reasoning of both groups is simple enough, little is achieved by killing themselves, something is gained by a reduction in human population, and hypothetic non existing grand children are spared a life much worse.
For most people, though, there's not neccesarily any clear decision, just behaviour that follows observations made decades past by Hans Rosling and others; as education and quality of life improve, so fall birth rates.
People who just don't want kids do not seem to make up the bulk of people who self-identify as "childfree", in my observation.
The problem is having decedents pay for our retirement. Instead, end that system and start saving for your own retirement.
This is mathetmatically ignorant. Clearly, if all 8 billion people are 90 yrs old, it wouldn't matter that there were 8 billion. It wouldn't matter that there were 900 quadrillion. 90 yr olds can't reproduce, and so those people are all functionally dead anyway.
A bee hive might be bustling, swarming with workers, but once the queen bee is gone, once the hive has no more capacity to rear another queen in a hurry, that hive has become functionally extinct. Pretending that it's just fine, that you can hear the buzzing and that there are thousands of cute little bees flying around is ignorant, because you're not counting on the only thing that matters. And just like with this bee hive, so you're talking the same about humanity. Functional extinction is looming.
It's not 8 billion in number, and in most of the world it is shrinking.
It's quite clearly getting ready to happen pretty much everywhere else, and is masked by immigration in those places where you might claim that population isn't shrinking.
All I see is ruinous insufficiency.
I mean we created the current system because people don't. And when they don't you end up with huge amounts of elderly eating cat food and otherwise starving in the streets. Oh, and old people vote, so good luck just getting rid of that.
But that is unavoidable!
> Instead, end that system and start saving for your own retirement.
If you are not talking from an individual's PoV but economically, or even globally, finance does not change that in all cases the young work for the old, and that economy always takes place in the here and now. Your "saving" influences the current economy, nothing is magically shifted into the far future.
And even if only a few rich countries tried "investing", hoping to shift the later burden to other countries, the question is at what point those with a more numerous younger population won't accept it any more.
It's one thing for tiny Norway with a few million to "invest abroad" so that their own age pyramid will be supported with money - and that means goods and services in the end - from abroad. It's something entirely different when the whole West and Japan all try it.
I don't understand this magical finance thinking. "Saving" does not actually exist, globally. Nobody freezes doctors and goods and services to revive them fifty years later, and money is just numbers in computers. You have to look at the real world to see what is actually feasible, not at "money".
Saving for retirement works for the individual, and only when it isn't what everybody does and the age pyramid is against you.
The problem with many proposed "solutions" is that those making them confuse "works for anyone" with "works for everyone". What happens when everyone actually follows the proposal? All while remembering that money represented by electrons in computers is not what you actually want. You actually want the real world stuff, so you can have whatever numbers you want, when the politics and powers change, your aging country having less power, they may prefer not to send you everything you hoped for. On a wealthy-country level for later adjustment, there are plenty of ways even without outright breaking the official rules.
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From an economy PoV (very different from that of the average person who is forced to just live within the rules), the role of "saving" is not really to take care of the future. Savings are a money stream in the here and now. What is shifted to the future is only information, but what the people of the future do with that information about what you did with your money in the past is up to them. If they find themselves in a bind, they may not honor it the way you hoped for. Again, on an economic level, individuals are bound by the system, the larger entities less so, they make those rules after all.
Saving is a way to make people earning a lot of money not actually ask for as many products and services as they could. So you can pretend that people have much higher salaries than they really do. In return you get nothing but promises: For not asking for as many things now we will take care of you in the future!
"Savings" are not needed for investing. It is used right now because we have it anyway, but if nothing was saved, we have plenty of modern money options, from credit based money creation to monetary policy to much more. Saving is for that psychological effect I mentioned, making people think they are more wealthy than the economy can actually handle, if they actually all tried to use the money to buy stuff, and for all the (mostly but not only finance) institutions whose own incomes depend on that money stream.
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To avoid misunderstandings, let me repeat: This is the larger perspective. Of course, from an individual's PoV you have to use whatever system there is. What I just wrote does NOT contradict that people may find it in their best interest to "save for retirement".
You have to use whatever system you find, but it is good to keep in mind that those systems follow their own rules, and they may change over time.
What worked for an American in early 19th century may actually not have been that different from what one would do now, "saving" paid off. But one should keep in mind, one important condition for this is that America was one of the strongest countries consistently for a long time. What happens the next fifty years may or may not follow that trend.
Whatever virtual numbers you are going to end up with, they will be interpreted by people and the system of the future. If everybody, and for argument's sake, let's say everybody saves enough in private retirement accounts, what will that mean? The age pyramid is quote predictable for many decades, and relying on foreigners to take care of any significant imbalance is quite optimistic.
A side effect of channeling retirement through big finance is that now politicians have an increasing incentive to protect the stock market, and the burden to finance retirees will be disproportionally on the big players. Leading to more "too big to fail" and worse capitalism, because large failure is not an option, since that would destroy too many retirement plans, leading to angry voters.
Perhaps because regardless of some policies targeting the economics/material issues of having kids that some countries have put in place (Russia, Hungary, S. Korea, etc.), those policies don't change the brutal cultural situations in those countries: 2 authoritarian regimes + extreme competitiveness of S. Korea.
It seems like the neoliberal era growth model has long since broken down, and our politics haven't adapted with deeper reforms to reflect the latest technologies, etc. that could produce more material abundance than today (see: China's rise).
As a left accelerationist, I can't help but think that a society with a 4 day week, no precarity, cheap access to good housing, healthcare, education, etc. would increase the social trust and the birth rate, as most people want kids and want them to grow up in a thriving society.
This is the mindset that caused the rise of the far right. People like this have their heads so far up their asses that they can't see the problems in their own land and need to meddle in others.
India already has far more people than these countries he mentioned, and I fail to see how it can be described as a well run country; it has more poor people than the whole of Africa combined.
Initially the Malthusian panic was about a world running out of standing room. When that did not pan out, now it is about a fear of brown/black people multiplying with abandon and overrunning supposedly well run countries. The majority of people who have migrated to, or sought asylum in, Europe in recent years (since the upheavals of the Arab spring) have been middle Eastern, not African.
Yet people persist in promoting a narrative of a supposed invasion of the West by Africans. so much so that its become the main geopolitical issue in the minds of common people there, fanning the flames of extremist far right sentiment.
He does have a point about trade though. More trade and less "aid" will help. Aid is a form of control, and the amounts given are a pittance anyways.
I would love to be so confident as to write this kind of weird stuff with a straight face.