Chris’s post on declining population has prompted me to get started on what I plan, in the end, to be a lengthy critique of the pro-natalist position that dominates public debate at the moment. My initial motivation to do this reflected long-standing concerns about human impacts on the environment but I don’t have any particular expertise on that topic, or anything new to say. Instead, I want to address the economic and social issues, making the case that a move to a below-replacement fertility rate is both inevitable and desirable.
I’m going to start with a claim that came up in discussion here and is raised pretty often. The claim is that the more children are born, the greater the chance that some of them will be Mozarts, Einsteins, or Mandelas who will contribute greatly to human advancement. My response was pre-figured several hundred years ago by Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Gray reflects that those buried in the churchyard may include some “mute inglorious Milton” whose poetic genius was never given the chance to flower because of poverty and unremitting labour
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
Billions of people alive today (the majority of whom are women) are in the same situation today, with their potential unrealised through lack of access to education and resources to express themselves. Rather than adding to their numbers, or diverting yet more resources away from them, we ought to be focusing on making a world where everyone has a chance to be a great poet or inventor.
Foreshadowing future argument
The political difficulties of achieving the necessary redistribution are immense. We are unlike to achieve even the basic targets set out in the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. But even supposing that the world were a fairer place, it is unlikely that we can provide the kind of education necessary for full participation in a modern economy while having more than two children each (that is, more than one child per parent) on average. The fact that fertility rates in all development countries are below this level is a reflection of economic reality, not the product of social decadence. I’ll be expanding on this point a lot, so I’d welcome it if the discussion focused on the main part of the post.
{ 79 comments }
Lee A. Arnold 01.12.24 at 1:42 pm
There are two reasons to refute the pro-natalist argument, and two reasons not to worry.
The contention that creativity is linear to population growth, hence more is better (asserted by Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource) would mean that right now we should have 12 Shakespeares walking around, 6 or 8 Beethovens, 2 or 3 Einsteins. This appears not to be the case.
In addition to more city crowding (the pronatalists almost all want re-zoning for taller highrises) we’ll have less land area for wildlife ecosystems, which is a requirement for their ecological and evolutionary continuance as is.
Reasons not to worry include machine learning and artificial intelligence, which eventually will automate production and much of scientific research.
Medical science is going to extend life. Neuroscience is going to transform everyone into a combination of Mozart and Einstein. There will be no dearth of artistic and scientific creativity.
The big questions will be about the concepts of money, work psychology, and land tenure (i.e. who gets to live where).
Mike Huben 01.12.24 at 2:54 pm
While I hardly want to support the pro-natalist position, I’d like to point out that AI will greatly increase access to high-quality education in the near future by performing individual training, instruction, and remediation. Not to mention keeping children from phone and internet distraction during learning sessions.
Which brings up another issue: AI will be able to monitor and censor children’s usage of phones, computers, and the internet. This will allow parents to greatly censor children’s usage. On the bright side, it will also be able to monitor communication with pederasts and other stalkers.
engels 01.12.24 at 3:04 pm
Spare a thought for the garrulous inglorious Miltons…
Tm 01.12.24 at 3:16 pm
LAA: „Medical science is going to extend life“
I’m skeptical of this much repeated claim. It seems quite possible that medical science has reached or will soon reach the limit of how far life expectancy can be extended. Empirically, life expectancies have stagnated or declined in many countries in recent years. Much of this was due to Covid but even after the pandemic, many countries have seen declines and most have not recovered to pre pandemic levels as of 2022 data. Data for 2023 will be interesting.
Events like the Covid pandemic are likely to occur again, maybe more frequently than we now imagine. Global warming will likely increase mortality due to heat waves, parasites and diseases spreading northward, flooding, drought and famine. Furthermore, health care systems even in highly developed countries are already under increasing strain.
The question of life expectancy has important implications for demographics and in particular for the politically very sensitive area of retirement provision. Yet I notice the observed pattern of stagnation is not talked about at all. The received wisdom still is the belief that life expectancy will continue increasing.
If anybody with expertise in the field is reading this, I’d like to hear your perspectives.
Robert Weston 01.12.24 at 3:27 pm
One thing I haven’t seen come up in these discussions is the impact of declining birthrates on elderly care. Yes, much of the pro-natalist, or at least pro-demographic growth argument in the West focuses on younger generations financing welfare systems. This said, I haven’t seen anything on actual day-to-day care of seniors. Is the assumption here that automation and AI would take up the load?
Phil H 01.12.24 at 3:48 pm
Here are some jumbled thoughts:
1) I don’t see any tension between having lots of people and spreading out resources more fairly. I certainly don’t think there’s any reason to believe that having fewer people will necessarily make for a fairer allocation; nor even that it makes fairness more likely. I don’t think we’re anywhere near a Malthusian threshold at the moment, so there’s no reason to think that an extra billion people, for example, would push large numbers into desperate poverty.
So I don’t think the argument makes sense. If you want fairness, then push for fairness, but that has nothing to do with “natalism.”
2) Assume there is some genetic component to cleverness. More than getting lots of Mozarts, having more people makes it more likely that we will get one super-Mozart or super-Einstein. And that’s quite an exciting idea. Remarkable individuals can make a big difference in certain fields; an even-more-sigma version of Einstein would definitely be worth having. She might get us fusion!
3) Still the basic utilitarian point: I can’t see how you can want the human race to go on, but nor want more of us. People are great! The more the merrier! I don’t have a solution to repugnant conclusion/Malthus-style problems, but I don’t think that undermines the basic point: people have value, more value is better.
4) If we did distribute wealth and resources better, so that people didn’t live in quite so much economic desperation, they might well want more children. Your point that it’s hard to support large families in the currently-existing economy is a good one; but if your goal is an economy quite different from the currently existing one, that constraint might just go away.
LFC 01.12.24 at 4:13 pm
I agree completely with the OP.
The notion that public policy should be influenced by the hope of producing more Mozarts or Shakespeares is absurd. In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky wrote: “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”
Maybe, maybe not. But it should not be a goal of public policy to ensure that that happens. A Shakespeare comes along maybe once every millennium, and the chances are too remote in the first place to make it a good argument for a pro-natalist policy.
Tm 01.12.24 at 4:16 pm
Phil: „I can’t see how you can want the human race to go on, but nor want more of us.„
I can’t see how you can want more of us if you want the human race to go on.
LFC 01.12.24 at 4:18 pm
p.s. It’s well known that as economic circumstances improve, fertility rates tend to decline. The “demographic transition” (in which death rates fall first, and then birth rates eventually follow) is a well-known phenomenon and a staple of textbooks, so there’s no particular need to elaborate.
steven t johnson 01.12.24 at 4:22 pm
“Billions of people alive today (the majority of whom are women) are in the same situation today, with their potential unrealised through lack of access to education and resources to express themselves. Rather than adding to their numbers, or diverting yet more resources away from them, we ought to be focusing on making a world where everyone has a chance to be a great poet or inventor.”
It seems likely to me that birthrate declines in countries as it gets more and more expensive to raise children. (The interpretation this is women refusing to be breeding machines and therefore a Good Thing is fake-left apologetics.) That’s why the rich don’t seem to have any problem keeping their birthrates above replacement level. There is a level of poverty where sex is still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment and the child might constitute a resource, if only a claim on the father (when he’s in the money.)
The call for deliberately lowering population is misplaced, a diversion from a call for a just society. This policy is already being carried out and it’s not producing justice. I have no idea why that would change if legal compulsions and inducements were added to economic ones, particularly since these can be guaranteed to be even more unevenly implemented. The Thanos argument that things will be better if there are fewer people makes no economic sense to me. Technology has progressed to the point that absolute immiseration such as hunger and malnutrition are effectively policy choices, not the inevitable consequences of Nature, red in tooth and claw.
I don’t know what a sane world would have as a population policy and laws. so I hesitate to legislate. I will say that every pro-natalist argument that effectively presume that if there were fewer people then they could all be chiefs, with no Indians, is flawed, to put it charitably. The working class will not be abolished when every worker becomes a small business owner, no matter what the movies assume.
Sean 01.12.24 at 5:48 pm
“most have not recovered to pre pandemic levels as of 2022 data. Data for 2023 will be interesting.”
In the USA and Canada, 2022 was the year with the highest number of deaths from COVID because people stopped taking infection control measures in the face of more infectious variants (and because COVID damages your circulatory and immune systems, so people wo get COVID are at increased risk of infections, heart attacks, strokes, etc.) If you think that 2022 was “after the pandemic” you have been lied to.
PatinIowa 01.12.24 at 7:03 pm
Surely someone has pointed out that there will be more Stalins, Pol Pots, Hitlers, and so on, right?
Given that those people will have access to nukes, and the Shakespeares and Mozarts will have access to theaters and concert halls, I think it’s a bad bargain.
I purposefully chose men here as examples of tyrants and aggressors. One of the features of increasing birthrates would seem to be diminishing the life opportunities (outside the family) of the people who will bear and care for the children. Unless things radically change, that’s women.
Which leads to an empirical question: I know there’s a correlation between increasing girls’ and women’s education and declining birthrates. Has anyone tried to calculate what the effect of giving every person who can bear children adequate material resources to live and some minimal level of education?
Tm 01.12.24 at 7:51 pm
The French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd (who in my opinion has written a lot of bullshit but bear with me) pointed out an interesting implication of falling fertility:
In a low fertility society, a significant share of families will not have any male offspring. For example a family with 2 children has a 25% probability of this. In traditionally patriarchal/patrilineal societies, this must lead to significant social change.
This was in a discussion of Iran, where total fertility is currently estimated at 1.7 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate).
J-D 01.12.24 at 11:44 pm
More or less, although my examples were actually Heinrich Kramer, Beria, and Timur.
John Q 01.13.24 at 12:20 am
“Surely someone has pointed out that there will be more Stalins, Pol Pots, Hitlers, and so on, right?”
Again, Thomas Gray was centuries ahead of the game. Immediately following Milton, we have “Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood. “
John Q 01.13.24 at 12:26 am
Lots of comments not directly on-topic. Future posts will address most of the points raised.
Cheryl Rofer 01.13.24 at 12:31 am
Billions of people alive today (the majority of whom are women) are in the same situation today, with their potential unrealised through lack of access to education and resources to express themselves. Rather than adding to their numbers, or diverting yet more resources away from them, we ought to be focusing on making a world where everyone has a chance to be a great poet or inventor.
Thank you.
Alan White 01.13.24 at 12:44 am
John, interesting post. My question is whether even some success in redistribution will result in more children both from thinking that one can afford more children and better health conditions resulting in lower child mortality. Does that make sense?
Peter Dorman 01.13.24 at 2:18 am
I share pretty much all of JQ’s reactions to pronatalism, but I don’t think this particular argument holds much water. If you accept the idea that, ceteris paribus, more population means more geniuses, and that the rest of us will benefit from their genius, that holds at any level of social/cultural equality. If everyone is given more resources and access to education etc., whatever it is we’re looking for from them, we’ll get more if there are more of them. It’s as if we had a pill which, given to expectant mothers, would double the chance that their offspring will be more than seven feet tall. There would be more future NBA centers populating the cribs, but China would still have more than Luxembourg.
The killer arguments against natalism are environmental and the benefits of crowding by choice, not necessity. And of course the superbaddies whose numbers will also increase. And add the consequences for women and the role their choices ought to play. Most of us probably agree on these.
Phil H 01.13.24 at 3:48 am
@Tm (8)
“I can’t see how you can want more of us if you want the human race to go on.”
I think this is silly. The more of X there are, the more likely X is to survive.
I suppose you’re gesturing towards some argument about the human race damaging the ecosystem or using up too many resources and causing its own extinction? Those arguments are silly, too. I’m not going to waste my time guessing which one you favour. If you want to put an argument, you’ll have to actually put it, not assume that a witty reversal can take the place of real logic and evidence.
Matt 01.13.24 at 4:10 am
People are great!
Counter point: people are awful. Or, at least, a good deal of them are.
J-D 01.13.24 at 7:44 am
When are ceteris ever paribus?
engels 01.13.24 at 11:10 am
I wonder how Milton would have turned out if he’d been on TikTok since the age of 10.
Bill Benzon 01.13.24 at 12:08 pm
Moreover, aren’t we moving into a world where human creativity is going to be augmented and extended by so-called AI? In that world even a fixed or declining population will be more and more creative, though I don’t think the universe much cares about such things. But if at least some of that creativity is directed toward human flourishing, whether through housing, food, health, education, etc., we’ll be just fine with a population that’s more in balance with the larger biosphere.
Tm 01.13.24 at 12:12 pm
Phil H bizarre. I did not in fact offer an argument because the arguments are too well known to need repeating. If you think the pointing out that humans are damaging the ecosystem is „silly“, there is no point arguing.
But also, you did not offer an argument either. Your claim which I parodied at 8 is a total nonsequitur. It is simply not the case that if X is good, more of X is better.
LFC 01.13.24 at 2:19 pm
Alan White @18
I believe it’s actually the other way around, for the most part anyway. When child mortality is high, people tend to have more children because they have less assurance that any given child will survive past infancy or childhood, and they often live in societies where children are expected to take care of parents in old age as the social-security systems common in richer countries may be absent. So when child mortality rates fall, as they have gradually been doing in most of the ‘developing world’ in recent decades, one can expect family sizes or at least numbers of births also to fall.
This used to be called “the demographic transition,” and maybe that’s still the terminology. (I haven’t really formally studied this stuff since around 1976.)
steven t johnson 01.13.24 at 4:21 pm
Re the arguments that low birth rates are a Good Thing because it means women are free from exploitation, aside from the question of how and why the rich don’t seem to be dying out, is that birth rates are declining in the People’s Republic of China. People who want capitalism to be the Final Society like to take a lot of hope from the GNP figures. And the way that “reform and opening up” has created much social damage like billionaires and garden spots in select neo-colonial SEZs, perversely regarded as admirable.
But this numerology forgets that per capital GDP in the PRC is still not very high. Despite the amazing achievements in lowering the poverty rates, the measures set for this are largely taken from the World Bank. This institution should be infamous for its indifference to human welfare, as opposed to its strenuous devotion to the monied. Meeting World Bank standards is not nothing. The US hasn’t been able to abolish poverty despite much more wealth and, according to everyone else here, democracy too. But it is not at all clear that the kind of wealth effect posited in the self-congratulatory version of “demographic transition” actually works as posited. This is triply true since the PRC has a much weaker welfare system. Yet birth rates in the PRC are declining. Given the PRC is by itself an appreciable fraction of humanity, this matters. (Indeed it is the PRC that inspires the pro-natalists worried about more cheap labor to vociferate.)
For that matter I recall glancing mentions of similar declines in birth rates of even poorer countries. The population decline as a result of a dramatic fall in birth rates in the former USSR under the blessings of democracy suggests also that being able to afford children has a great deal to do with population, not just women’s distaste for exploitation.
Surveying the thread it’s not clear how much pro-natalism is really about the need for cheap labor and how much anti-natalism is about getting rid of dead weight.
JimV 01.13.24 at 4:53 pm
In case there is anyone who doesn’t know, the human race is doomed. It will not go on forever, neither will this solar system or this galaxy. (E.g., the upcoming collision with Andromeda.) The issue is how to do our best with the time and resources available to us.
There were about one billion people living in 1900, about four billion when I was born, about eight billion now. If we don’t find a fair, long-sustainable equilibrium, nature will find an unfair one.
That’s the position as I have seen it for a long time now, so I agree strongly with the OP.
reason 01.13.24 at 4:55 pm
LFC – that is basically correct but there is another aspect. A middle class lifestyle is VERY capital intensive. And that includes of course the cost of housing and education and the opportunity cost involved in caring for them. For the middle classes cost/benefit says have few children. For they very rich (Elon Musk) they can do whatever they like.
I like to say if you want to reduce population growth do three things: 1. Educate women, 2 provide health care including contraceptive advice, provide social security.
Think about the relative population growth figures for Kerala and for Saudi Arabia. It is not a simple effect of wealth.
Ray V 01.13.24 at 7:05 pm
Why does one need to be pro or anti natalist?
Many feared the problem of runaway population. Many of these fears were also linked to racism and xenophobia, as well as an ideology that concealed the harm of colonialism and neocolonialism under a veil of inevitability.
If it had come to pass though, it would have been quite a problem, a cause of enormous suffering, and a tragedy.
The other thing, slowing population is something that can be planned for. We probably could not adapt to meet the needs of 50 billion people. But we could adapt to meet the needs of a shrinking population in some societies.
We need not encourage it or discourage it. A better strategy would be to focus on the flourishing of individuals, and their value–and this includes freedom, including the freedom to not reproduce.
Because these societies have some rather intense objection to increasing population through immigration, slowing population is the most severe problem for Europe, Japan, and China.
While we have moved into a politically unstable period, we have also moved into an incredible era for human beings where we have substantially fewer deaths of children. Taking the long view on humanity, a species that is currently estimated to be 315,000 years old perhaps what we see is the infancy of our species when technologically capable of meeting the needs of all. This would be the optimistic view. Because we can meet the basic needs of all, would the most essential issue not be growth of population but rather and end to all deaths of deprivation? Then we can worry about the other thing. It’s easier to solve for a lower growth population, which is how China managed to pull off what is really a world historical feat. There’s a new problem now but it’s abstract compared to millions of people dying of starvation.
I simply wish we could frame this problem in terms of bedrock values. And also remember that we are not good predictors of the future.
For example, what kind of innovations are we talking about? We’ve innovated a vast array of plastics and solvents. Are these so valuable it’s an argument for population growth? We don’t have any knock down evidence that the technology we developed during the last 200 years or so is superior to innovations of the past. It’s not the case that smaller groups didn’t innovate to meet their needs. Nor is it the case that they lacked for creativity in the arts. There’s no argument made that the surplus innovations we have are all improving human existence, or creating things of greater value.
What exactly are we going for, in other words? In what sense is a new form of plastic essential but a 15,000 line oral poem inessential? I am skeptical an argument exists to weigh these, since their value is incommensurable. But one lasts and the other doesn’t. One is of civilizational value and the other is of economic or technical value. Is reduction in the latter cause for great alarm? I can’t prove anything about this now but let’s not conflate it with the former.
LFC 01.13.24 at 8:29 pm
reason @29
Your points are well taken.
Phil H 01.14.24 at 7:48 am
@Tm 25
That’s a bit of a retreat. You go from “…the human race to go on” to “…humans are damaging the ecosystem”. What’s silly here is you apparently equating these two. Humans are indeed damaging the ecosystem. This is very unlikely to cause the human race to disappear.
On the more-is-better question… Not an easy one. First, I’d like to cut near-infinite absurdities out of the question, because I don’t think they help clarity. (I.e. if the Tribbles keep on breeding forever, they’ll fill the universe and it’ll collapse under its own weight into a black hole – and the same goes for humans! Take anything to an extreme and you end up with some kind of absurd result. But I don’t think that’s germane to the question of whether more is better.)
So, ignoring the extremes, does a thing being good necessarily imply that more is better… I find it hard to understand how it wouldn’t. In order for that to be the case, I think one of the following would have to be true:
1) It’s the kind of thing where the quantity of the thing does not affect its goodness.
2) It’s the kind of thing that has a natural quantity that ought to exist.
3) It’s the kind of thing that has a maximum, so at low levels more is better, but at some point more becomes worse. (Are these three exhaustive?)
I don’t know if any of those kinds of thing exist, but I don’t think people fit any of those. A large number of people existing seems to me to be better than a very small number (because with a large number we get more diversity, resilience to disaster, etc.) I don’t think there’s any natural quantity of people. And I don’t see that humanity is at any kind of maximum now, where every baby born is making the world worse.
So, no I think I just straight up disagree with your assertion. Saying a thing is good in general is saying that more of it is better (what else could it mean?). For people, I think this general case holds. And I think people are good, therefore more of them would be better.
You’re right that I didn’t provide arguments previously. So here they are!
J-D 01.14.24 at 8:15 am
All of them? All the time?
Tm 01.14.24 at 10:10 am
Phil H I’m sorry I have to wade into this again but this will be the last time. You are the one who called it „silly“ to argue that humans are damaging the ecosystem and I called you out for it. That’s all. I’m not retreating from anything. As I said there is no point arguing with your position and I’m not going to.
Tm 01.14.24 at 10:15 am
Just this. I’m a cat lover and yet I wouldn’t want there to be 50 cats in my living room. Cat lovers are in favor of sterilizing cats because they understand that that is both in their own best interest and in that of the ecosystem. They really truly love cats and consider their existence a very good thing but they understand this doesn’t imply that there should be trillions of cats on this planet.
I sense that you are not a cat person… ???? Good luck to you.
Philip Hand 01.14.24 at 1:14 pm
@Tm:
“some argument about the human race damaging the ecosystem or using up too many resources and causing its own extinction…silly” You have to read all of the sentence. If you take one little chunk of my sentence and misunderstand it in isolation, you will be incorrect.
@J-D
I’d take a fairly robust line on that. Like, almost all of them, almost all of the time. I don’t know how to begin to quantify that, but… yeah, pretty close. If you want to argue against, you’re welcome to, but you will have to give an argument, not just a rhetorical question. I genuinely didn’t think that was going to be a controversial statement!
Lee A. Arnold 01.14.24 at 1:59 pm
John Q, what (in a nutshell) are the UN’s practical means of implementation for the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030?
J-D 01.14.24 at 11:26 pm
That you should think it true is one thing: that you should think it uncontroversial something else again. It’s my understanding that it is a longstanding subject of philosophical debate, whether humans are good by nature or the opposite. Is your understanding different?
Doug Muir 01.15.24 at 1:50 pm
OP: “it is unlikely that we can provide the kind of education necessary for full participation in a modern economy while having more than two children each (that is, more than one child per parent) on average.”
— That “we” in “we can provide” is doing a lot of work here.
I have four kids. Two are in university. Two more are in Gymnasium meaning they’re university bound. Even if the older ones drop out or the younger ones don’t go, I think I can claim with a straight face that they are getting “the kind of education necessary for full participation in a modern economy”.
Are the educational requirements for a modern society really that much higher than they were in the 1970s and 1980s when inflated numbers of Baby Boom children were flowing through high school and college?
Doug M.
engels 01.15.24 at 2:36 pm
Something that I think became embarrassingly obvious during Covid lockdowns (and therefore had to be swiftly memory-holed) is that the people who are essential to keeping “modern society” functioning aren’t mainly the highly educated.
Phil H 01.15.24 at 4:38 pm
@J-D, 39
“It’s my understanding that it is a longstanding subject of philosophical debate…”
I think you’re confusing two distinct things there. There is the question of whether people are morally good or morally bad, which I agree has been the subject of some debate (though I don’t think there are many philosophers who have come down on the side of thinking that we’re more bad than good). But the question of whether humanity is a good – i.e. whether it is a good thing that we exist at all – is distinct from the question of the moral worthiness of (any number of) individuals. This latter sense is what I was arguing for. And I can’t think of any philosopher who has argued that the existence of humanity is a negative overall. Can you?
@Doug M, 40
I don’t know if it’s just educational requirements. The physical infrastructure can be another factor that pushes you towards fewer children. In another discussion on here, someone mentioned housing. Where I live, pretty much everyone lives in flats, and the flats are all maximum 3 bedrooms. It would be a logistical nightmare to have a third kid here, simply because you’d have to buy a very expensive bit of real estate or live miles out.
Similarly, there’s longer working hours, more schooling, and more restrictions on how children can amuse themselves (in China – these factors will apply more or less in other parts of the world).
(Culture also seems to play a massive factor, which is not necessarily one of the pressures of the modern industrial economy.)
Since the end of the one child policy here, these factors have combined to keep birthrates very very low.
Doug Muir 01.15.24 at 6:48 pm
“The physical infrastructure can be another factor that pushes you towards fewer children. In another discussion on here, someone mentioned housing. Where I live, pretty much everyone lives in flats, and the flats are all maximum 3 bedrooms. It would be a logistical nightmare to have a third kid here, simply because you’d have to buy a very expensive bit of real estate or live miles out. Similarly, there’s longer working hours, more schooling, and more restrictions on how children can amuse themselves”
1) Right, but these are all completely separate from the OP claim that it has anything to do with education.
2) I agree with the general principle that society and its infrastructure can be more or less child-friendly — everything from housing stock, to what sorts of cars are sold, to the number of playgrounds, you name it. But wrt housing stock specifically, I’ll note that in most countries this changes only very slowly: there are still plenty of older homes and apartments around with more bedrooms / more child-friendly. And also — speaking from personal experience — for almost 10 years we squeezed 4 kids into 2 bedrooms. Because bunk beds are a technology that exists! Having a separate room for each child is not actually a moral imperative.
3) Longer working hours is absolutely an issue. But that’s a social and cultural choice, not an inevitable consequence of modernity. The average worker in China works about 46 hours per week; in France it’s 36 and in Austria it’s 32. Yet France and Austria are wealthy developed countries and pleasant places to live. (And it’s perhaps not a coincidence that France is averaging 1.8 children / woman, while China is under 1.3 and falling.)
Doug M.
J-D 01.15.24 at 10:10 pm
I don’t know of any philosophers who argue either that it is a good thing that humanity exists or that it is a bad thing that humanity exists, and if I did I’m not sure they’d make sense to me: neither the idea that it is a good thing that something exists nor the idea that it is a bad thing that something exists makes sense to me.
engels 01.15.24 at 10:50 pm
it is unlikely that we can provide the kind of education necessary for full participation in a modern economy while having more than two children each (that is, more than one child per parent) on average
What is the reasoning behind this?
John Q 01.16.24 at 2:12 am
Engels @44 Raising children to the level required requires a large input of resources and labour. More on this soon
John Q 01.16.24 at 2:15 am
“Are the educational requirements for a modern society really that much higher than they were in the 1970s and 1980s when inflated numbers of Baby Boom children were flowing through high school and college?”
At least in Australia yes. I turned 14 in 1970, and around half my classmates left school in that year. That isn’t even a legal option now.
John Q 01.16.24 at 2:26 am
Lee @37 I haven’t checked in this for a while, but last time I checked, most of the goals could be met by 2030 with a once-off payment of $1 trillion, that is an additional 0.2 per cent of world income every year.
J-D 01.16.24 at 3:34 am
To some extent the answer varies depending on how one interprets the word ‘requirements’ in ‘educational requirements’. There’s no room for doubt that lack of the certificate obtained at the end of secondary schooling (Year 12) restricts options much more now than it used to (although my nephew, who dropped out of school halfway through Year 11 to become a professional chess coach, is doing very well at it, proving my sister’s concerns at the time groundless–not that I blame her, it was hard to know at the time). Whether students learn much that is of much use to them in later life during the last two years of schooling (or some of the earlier years, come to that) is a different question.
John Q 01.16.24 at 4:12 am
“Whether students learn much that is of much use to them in later life during the last two years of schooling (or some of the earlier years, come to that) is a different question.”
It’s not as much formal learning as the “hidden curriculum” of learning to work without constant supervision and correction. Back then, there was enough grunt work that a willing teenager could learn on the job and still earn their wages. Now they would just be a nuisance, generating more work than they performed.
Year 12 was enough for entry to most white-collar careers. All those entry-level jobs are gone now, and you need a uni degree for entry to the same careers, not because of specific content but because of generic skills.
J-D 01.16.24 at 5:08 am
Of course students at school learn more from the experience than just what they’re nominally being taught. The question remains: how much of later usefulness do they pick up from the hidden curriculum in the last year, or last few years, that they didn’t already pick up in earlier years? My nephew (who isn’t doing ‘grunt work’) may be a highly exceptional individual, but then again maybe he isn’t.
tm 01.16.24 at 8:36 am
“It’s not as much formal learning as the “hidden curriculum” of learning to work without constant supervision and correction.”
That’s one reason why the dual system (vocational training in a real workplace integrated with some school) is a really superior option for people who don’t want academic training.
Doug Muir 01.16.24 at 11:17 am
“At least in Australia yes. I turned 14 in 1970, and around half my classmates left school in that year. That isn’t even a legal option now.”
— It is here in Germany, where about a quarter of all students leave school by age 16, and another quarter finish high school but don’t go on to university.
tbc, Germany has extremely well-developed systems of apprenticeship and on-the-job training for young young people. So, it’s perfectly possible for a kid to leave school at 16, start work as a housepainter or car mechanic, and move on up to a middle-class lifestyle. (In Germany, “blue collar” and “middle class” are not contradictory.)
So, “this wouldn’t be allowed in Australia today” != “this is an inexorable law of modernity”.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 01.16.24 at 11:31 am
“Back then, there was enough grunt work that a willing teenager could learn on the job and still earn their wages. Now they would just be a nuisance, generating more work than they performed.”
Again, this seems like a weird generalization from parochial experience.
One of my kids works part-time as a waiter at the restaurant down the street. He’s one of their most valued employees! Learned on the job, moved up from unskilled busboy to semiskilled waiter/cashier.
More generally, Germany has a system of putting young people into jobs. As a result, Germany has one of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the world. Are these young people “just a nuisance, generating more work than they perform”? German productivity strongly suggests otherwise.
Not to harp on this, but you’re making statements that I can look out my window and refute. I mean that literally. If I look out my window, I see a bright orange sports car parked across the street. It belongs to the neighbors’ kid, who I used to tutor in English at my kitchen table. He left school at 15 to become an auto mechanic. Now he’s twentysomething and has a sports car, a big-screen TV, a snappy leather jacket and a girlfriend.
You can argue that Germany is weird, and okay, that’s a viable argument. But claiming that a successful 21st century economy requires most young people to go to university? That’s a non-fact statement. 72% of Germans aged 25-34 do not have a university degree, and Germany has a large advanced economy that is doing just fine.
Doug M.
MisterMr 01.16.24 at 1:39 pm
@Doug Muir 53
“More generally, Germany has a system of putting young people into jobs. As a result, Germany has one of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the world.”
I fear that the logic is backward: Germany has low unemployment (due to a very large export sector) and therefore its system of putting young people into jobs works better (because there is less competition for entry level jobs).
That said, I think that in reality what happens is that capitalist systems do create a certain level of unemployment (or to put it in a different way enter a recession if employment is too low because of profit squeeze), and therefore workers have to compete a lot against one another; the consequence of this competition is that people try to increase their child’s sholarisation to advantage them in the competition, which ultimately leads to a lot of overtrained people, and makes it very difficult for not overtrained people to enter the market.
Hence my guess that Germany’s situation is due to high exports.
Trader Joe 01.16.24 at 1:46 pm
Two thoughts:
Perhaps there aren’t more Mozarts and Shakespeares because those in current times with such talent are taking the far easier and more remunerative path of becoming pop-musicians, Tik-toc influencers and the like rather than honing their skills and producing the greatness we associate with these masters. For that matter why is excellence in the arts the cultural standard anymore – maybe today’s kick-ass Mozarts are AI programmers.
Second – while I agree broadly with the OP, I think a declining population would actually create severe strains on Socialist oriented systems. While in the long-run there would be more resource to divide among fewer, in the short-run these systems are largely supported by borrowing from the youth to pay for the elderly and that chain of funding wouldn’t work under population shrinkage. Significant revisions to how these systems work would be necessary which unfortunately would release a lot of political wrnagling and likely a lot of disruption as its figured out.
Doug Muir 01.16.24 at 2:19 pm
“Hence my guess that Germany’s situation is due to high exports”
It’s good to guess at reasons for things; that’s one way we learn new stuff. But, you know, you don’t have to stop there! Your guess is testable. You can check it. 30 seconds with google!
Here’s what you do: google “list of countries by exports”. You’ll get a bunch of hits, including a wikipedia page, with cites. The top five are China, the US, Germany, France, and the UK, in that order. (Yes, the UK and France are both major export powerhouses.) If you would prefer per capita, there’s a page for that too.
Then you google “list countries by youth unemployment”. Again, a bunch of pages. Now check those top five — hell, you can check the top ten or fifteen if you like, this is pretty easy. What do you see?
Two spoilers: exports (whether absolute or per capita) do not correlate strongly with youth unemployment, and Germany stands out.
Doug M.
engels 01.16.24 at 6:56 pm
The last time I was in Waitrose I overheard the staff deep in conversation about Gramsci. That could be evidence for John’s reproduction number, or that Education Education Education is about to backfire…
Tm 01.16.24 at 7:40 pm
A propos: It has been reported that China has high youth unemployment while also suffering from a labor shortage due to low fertility. I have tried to find an explanation for this paradox but wasn’t able to. It seems however that there must be a considerable mismatch between the skills in demand and the ones produced by the education system. Also it seems that wages for jobs that are in demand are too low but why the hell wouldn’t the Communist Party agree to wage raises?
In response to MisterMr, the rich countries also have considerable labor shortages while unemployment is relatively low. The shortage of skilled workers, or Fachkräftemangel, has in fact been the biggest economic news in recent years. So perhaps the wisdom of producing a lot of overtrained (but trained for what?) graduates is less obvious these days.
LFC 01.16.24 at 10:23 pm
Doug Muir @53
Yes, a successful 21st-c. economy indeed should not require most young people to go to university. However, in the U.S. the uneven quality of high-school education means that some students don’t learn the basic skills there that they are supposed to. But even in the U.S., which lacks the kind of well-organized, widespread apprenticeship system etc. that Germany has, a young person who knows they want to go into the labor force right after high school as, say, a craftsman or skilled laborer of some kind can do that successfully, if they’re given the right support and pointed in the right directions.
engels 01.16.24 at 11:34 pm
Here’s what you do: google “list of countries by exports”. You’ll get a bunch of hits, including a wikipedia page, with cites. The top five are China, the US, Germany, France, and the UK, in that order. (Yes, the UK and France are both major export powerhouses.) If you would prefer per capita, there’s a page for that too.
And if you look at “employment supported by exports” Germany is a dramatic outlier within the EU,
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=532048
hix 01.17.24 at 1:12 am
Most people leaving after 8th grade in 1970 sounds about right in Germany too, as most people finished school with Hauptschule which should still have been 8 years back then.
Schooling goes up up ever since then just like everywhere else despite all the conservative efforts to undermine it. Nowadays, 9 th grade + 1 year trade school is a legal minimum. Fachhochschule was just introduced in 1970. Despite repeated massive conservative efforts to restrict higher levels of schooling, all levels go up, just like everywhere else.
In contrast to popular perception, a third of the German youth that does not attend University also gets their education in schools, not apprenticeships. That includes some of the more qualified jobs that are only taught at schools.
People in disabled workshops, Lernwerkstätten or some jobcenter Maßnahmen count as not unemployed. They are not really in any education or get paid either.***
Now I got a master degree and was never really able to work in my life. Add the Porsche driving Hauptschulgraduate and we got n=1 rich Hauptschule and n=1 poor Mater. All those stubborn presumptuous people that have been told by those wise Gymnasium teachers they are useless at school at some point should just have started some luxury apprenticeship at say Siemens or Audi, then we would now make the big bucks (and get the girl!*).
One really has to wonder just how poor Germany would get, if we would stop being proud of how many people we kick out of the academic path at every single point and finally started to make an effort to do decent teaching for the kids of all social classes and health levels instead.
If we then started giving everybody with a college degree a chance to work up to the level of his/her qualification, maybe even those with degrees that do not have a reputation of proper indoctrination as an inequality supporting docile work drone (or labourer exploiting boss), and if we then would start to employ some brown people with non-German degrees up to their qualification – certainly, gdp would collapse to third world level.
Aside the n, I got to wonder about which level of schooling that person in the anecdote did attain in the end, if he went for a craftsman master or technician, maybe also did Berufsoberschule **- which would not be so unusual for that small part of Bavarian Hauptschul graduates that do succeed economically, he probably sat at schoolrooms just as long as many Australian college graduates.
*Really, that one too. Not how it works on average, with much higher female education attainment and social pressure to not get into a relationship with someone that has a lower formal education level on women.
**No doubt in the process receiving even more abuse by teachers that think Abitur and University should only be for a selected meritocratic elite (curiously always the kids of the high educated and rich) than anybody with non-privileged parents going the direct path at a Gymnasium.
***At which level of qualification people are pressured into each of the three mentioned is just astonishing. Pretty sure our kick out and abuse education system supporters have never seen that dark side of Germany.
Now I´ll stop writing long angry bitter half off-topic comments and go back to being unwelcome and probably soon kicked out of a German business Master. If so, that result will be a well deserved destiny due to lack of merit. Maybe a disabled workshop will be a proper solution afterwards, if just do not accept your destiny early enough, one got to kick down further after all. Not unemployed then by definition, not that it would have mattered for youth unemployment within the last decade, but at least for general unemployment!
John Q 01.17.24 at 6:39 am
“More years of education with every succeeding cohort” may not be an inexorable law of modernity, but it appears to be an almost universal rule, according to this site. Nearly all developed countries have risen from about 9 years mid-last century to 13 years today (this is average for the 15-64 population, so a lagging indicator and with some education incomplete). Germany looks typical.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/mean-years-of-schooling-long-run
Tm 01.17.24 at 7:11 am
JQ somehow my posts don’t come through any more?
John Q 01.17.24 at 7:38 am
I missed one, which I’ve posted now. Any more missing?
TM 01.17.24 at 7:46 am
engels 60: the page you link to doesn’t seem to show what you say: “In 2021, the EU Member States with the highest share of employment supported by EU exports were Ireland (27 %), Luxembourg (25 %) and Bulgaria (23 %).” Germany’s share is 15.2%, between Denmark and Romania.
TM 01.17.24 at 10:46 am
China published 2023 figures: number of births declined again. In just 10 years, the birth rate has fallen by half, despite the end of the one child policy in 2015. That is really something. Also interesting, mortality has jumped 10% in 2 years, after remaining near constant for a long time. I wonder how much of this is due to Covid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Vital_statistics
The NYT, true to form: “China’s efforts to stabilize a shrinking population and maintain economic growth are failing.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/business/china-birth-rate-2023.html) But the economy grew at 5.2%, better than in 2022. I guess they’ll never learn.
Doug Muir 01.17.24 at 12:45 pm
““More years of education with every succeeding cohort” may not be an inexorable law of modernity, but it appears to be an almost universal rule, ”
— Sure, but that wasn’t your claim. You said “Back then, there was enough grunt work that a willing teenager could learn on the job and still earn their wages. Now they would just be a nuisance, generating more work than they performed.” That’s a broad and strange claim, and one that the evidence at hand does not well support.
You also said, “Year 12 was enough for entry to most white-collar careers. All those entry-level jobs are gone now”. At least in Germany, this is absolutely not true. Germany youth unemployment is almost the lowest in the world; there are large numbers of entry-level jobs available for young people both with and without university degrees.
Finally, while rising levels of education correlate with time and rising income, the correlation is uneven and often weak. So, for instance, from 1970 to 2020 Australia went from 10.1 to 12.9. That’s certainly an increase, but another 2.8 years over the course of two generations is not exactly massive and game changing.
Also, mean 12.9 suggests that the majority of Australian adults have either just a year or two of college, or none. Checking, I see that 56% of Australians aged 25-34 don’t have a uni degree, so that roughly fits. What are those 56% of adults doing, then, if “all those entry level jobs are gone”?
TBC, I don’t disagree that rising incomes correlate with more time spent in school. Nor do I disagree that there’s a broad trend across developed countries towards credentializing jobs that didn’t used to require a college degree, thereby tending to decrease the number of entry level jobs.
What I /do/ disagree with are sweeping statements like “all those jobs are gone” and “now teenagers would just be a nuisance”. A thing declining is not the same as that thing disappearing altogether. I also disagree that the disappearance of entry level jobs and of non-university tracks to middle class comfort are inevitable, because Germany is a massive counterexample to both of those.
This feels like a generalization based in academe — where credentialism really has gone quite mad, and where entry level tenure track jobs have declined so sharply that you can say, with only modest exaggeration, that they have in fact disappeared. But academe is its own weird little world.
Doug M.
engels 01.17.24 at 2:11 pm
I’d encourage everyone to read Hix #61.
I find it hard to predict which comments will be approved, disapproved, disapproved then approved, and approved then disapproved… ours is not to reason why but in this discussion I’m inferring eugenics is not to be mentioned (which is hard when people are explicitly comparing population policy to sterilising cats).
Harry 01.17.24 at 6:46 pm
I’m worried now because last time I was in Waitrose my step-brother mentioned Gramsci, but I told him to shut up and focus on the arcane ingredients my nephew was demanding that we look for.
Tm 01.17.24 at 8:36 pm
For Chrissake engels 68… the cat example was in direct response to the specific claim that „a thing being good necessarily implies that more is better…“ (32)
You indicate that you are trying to change the subject of this thread and JQ doesn’t let you… too bad.
John Q 01.17.24 at 9:26 pm
You appear to be ignoring trade qualifications, and incomplete degrees. The majority of younger Australians have either some uni education or a trade qualification or both.
Also worth observing that eight years was the compulsory minimum throughout the 20th century. So, postcompulsory education has doubled, and is still rising.
Having said all that, I agree that the points I made in comments were overstated. Please read “these jobs no longer exist” as “there aren’t as many of these jobs as they used to be”, and so on. I’ll write a more considered post on education soon.
J-D 01.18.24 at 2:25 am
Since it’s been mentioned: I’m not definitively affirming that credentialism is the explanation for people spending more time in formal education; but it’s a possible explanation or partial explanation, which shouldn’t be dismissed without good reason.
John Q 01.18.24 at 3:55 am
I’ve written about why I reject the various claims made about credentialism here
https://insidestory.org.au/in-praise-of-credentialism/
But I know from experience that no-one will be convinced. So, I’ll try a different argument.
Since the beginning of modern society, the typical amount of formal schooling undertaken by children has increased from approximately zero (premodern) to eight years (C19 compulsory education acts) to more than 12 (norm of high school completion). That has happened everywhere in the world, with no significant interruptions to the trend, despite radical differences in labour market structures. So, complaining about credentialism is like complaining about laziness – you might be correct, but it isn’t going to change.
MisterMr 01.18.24 at 5:00 pm
So, my claim in 54 was:
“I fear that the logic is backward: Germany has low unemployment (due to a very large export sector) and therefore its system of putting young people into jobs works better (because there is less competition for entry level jobs).”
that then I simplified into
“Hence my guess that Germany’s situation is due to high exports.”
So there are two different claims: the first is that youth unemployment in Germany is low because unemployment in general is low in Germany; I think it is a pretty reasonable assumption.
The second is that unemployment in Germany is low because of the big export sector. Now this is more dubious, countries may be big exporters and have high unemployment (if for example they have low internal demand). My position is that Germany overall does have a big “pull” from the export sector, and that this happens for a variety of macro level reasons that can’t be replicated by other countries.
I suppose that this is where the disagreement is, but perhaps it is a claim for another thread.
@TM 58
“A propos: It has been reported that China has high youth unemployment while also suffering from a labor shortage due to low fertility. I have tried to find an explanation for this paradox but wasn’t able to.”
They have a labor shortage in the sense that they cannot find workers at wages that permit the expected level of profits, which in turn might depend from low internal demand for consumption goods, which in turn might depend on a low general wage share. This is because for something like 20+ years the Chinese economy was geared towards enormous levels of exports/investiments to create demand, and it is not simple to rebalance. IMHO.
hix 01.18.24 at 9:16 pm
For what it’s worth, here’s what seems to me the best number to compare youth underoccupation between countries, and my hunch is this one still makes Germany look better than it actually is (and if you adjust for overall unemployment that number already looks rather unimpressive), because there is so much nonsensical non education going on here which counts formally as “people in education”, that makes the numbers look better.
If you look at youth unemployment as such, you make countries where the strong candidates almost all go a relatively long academic path (which seems a reasonable choice for a society) look bad, as they are just not part of the labour market pool from which unemployment is calculated in that age cohort.
It just makes sense to put much weaker candidates through college in general, and accept them as graduates at more prestigious degrees, even leaving aside how unfair the system selects overall. A so so computer scientist is not going to hurt anyone, is not particular expensive to produce and can still do rather useful work, for example. Even more basic, at least accept 12/13 year school as the norm for everyone.
Iceland LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 4
Sweden LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 4.9
Norway LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 6.4
Belgium LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 6.6
Portugal LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 6.6
Denmark LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 6.7
Luxembourg LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 6.7
Germany LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 6.8
Ireland LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 6.8
Czechia LFS – Labour Force Sample Survey Total 2022 7.6
Finland LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 7.6
Poland LFS – EU Labour Force Survey Total 2022 8
Slovenia LFS – Labour Force Survey Total 2022 8.4
https://www.ilo.org/shinyapps/bulkexplorer41/?id=SDG_0861_SEX_RT_A&ref_area=ALB+AUT+BLR+BEL+BIH+BGR+HRV+CZE+DNK+EST+FIN+FRA+DEU+GRC+HUN+ISL+IRL+ITA+KOS+LVA+LTU+LUX+MLT+MDA+MNE+NLD+MKD+NOR+POL+PRT+ROU+RUS+SRB+SVK+SVN+ESP+SWE+CHE+UKR+GBR&sex=SEX_T&timefrom=2022
engels 01.19.24 at 1:23 pm
Harry, I don’t think it was you and your step-brother (unless you were wearing Waitrose uniforms) but next time I’ll ask.
Tm 01.19.24 at 3:37 pm
his et al:
What I like about German higher education:
There is no concept of elite education. A degree is a degree, nobody cares or makes a fuss about what institution somebody attended. No Harvard here Oxford there dominating the education discourse. No ambitious parents pushing their middle school children to start working on their college application.
Nobody pretending that academic learning is the only kind of education that counts.
Nobody telling a young person that without a college degree, you are useless and will „end up flipping burgers“.
There is a „dark side“, as hix says, in that children are sorted into tracks at an early age, although it depends on the state, and there is a degree of permeability (the Zweite Bildungsweg).
Hix at 75, you seem to suggest it would be better to enroll more students in computer science even if they are academically weak. Most of my IT colleagues are not computer scientists and many have no academic degree. IT professionals in D-A-CH often have a vocational training that involves trade school and simultaneous immersion in a company apprenticeship. This seems to work well, probably better than forcing academic education on students who don’t like it. Btw have you ever been in the situation to teach students who resented having to sit in a classroom?
International statistics of educational attainment are often difficult to interpret because of differences in education is conceived and measured. But to my surprise, Germany scores highly in the UN Education Index measuring average years of schooling (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index), despite scoring low in tertiary education attainment (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment).
Doug K 01.19.24 at 11:24 pm
“Billions of people alive today (the majority of whom are women) are in the same situation today, with their potential unrealised through lack of access to education and resources to express themselves. Rather than adding to their numbers, or diverting yet more resources away from them, we ought to be focusing on making a world where everyone has a chance to be a great poet or inventor.”
The corollary to that is,
that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot
The unpaid unseen labor of mothers always springs to mind here.
The rich can have lots of children since they outsource their childcare, and can afford university for them all. As LFC points out, the middle class can do neither of these things, except maybe in the socialist hellscapes of Europe where Doug M. lives.
John’s point I think is that we can’t afford it in society as it exists. Making the rest of the world like Germany at least in terms of education and healthcare might change it. Now we confront the miseries of political economy. I like Allan Quatermain’s take on this – once back in England and reflecting on a life in the wilds of Africa,
I would go again where the wild game was, back to the land whereof none know the history, back to the savages, whom I love, although some of them are almost as merciless as Political Economy.
J-D 01.21.24 at 7:30 am
I line up my own experience in the job in which I am actually currently employed against what’s written there, and I don’t find a match. I could provide the details, but …
… if there’s nothing you can say that will induce other people to change their minds, is there anything anybody else can say that will induce you to change your mind?
Besides …
… you’re right about that.
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