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Not strictly related, but I was musing the other week that, to some extent, anti-natalist policies and sub-replacement birthrates provide a "burning the seed corn" sort of economic stimulus that looks good on paper -- for a generation or so. You get an immediate benefit from freeing up childcare workers and educators for more immediately-useful tasks.
I don't have any hard data for this, but it feels like what Japan and Korea, and likely soon China too, are going through. And the West may not be too far behind.
Yes, it's not just "to some extent", it's a giant effect. It's all about the fundamentals, baby. One of the things even strategy video games are teaching you is that by far the worst thing you can have is a dependant, i.e. a person that produces nothing but eats resources. For a toy example, imagine that you have 100 people each producing 1 unit of [resources], and using up 0.6 of [resources] (which is already quite optimistic). So you generate a surplus of 40 with a full pop, which can be invested profitably (often according to an exponential growth function, which means that looking only at the original surplus is vastly underestimating the differences). With 10% dependants, it's 90-60=30, so a 25% loss of surplus. With 20% dependants, it's 80-60=20, a whopping 50% loss. Yes you can often get a few extra % with some smart organising, but you can't really overcome even just modest differences in the fundamentals.
This is the same for companies. An employee that doesn't produce anything not only eats up pay, they also takes up office space, HR resources. In reality, an employee often just creates a modest surplus above their pay, so even being slightly less productive will put the employee into the negative unless the pay gets substantially slashed. Which is the reason why firing the least productive employees should be the first thing every company does once it gets into the red. There is good reasons why we try to make jobs as safe as possible, but we shouldn't kid ourselves, it costs us big bucks.
Which leads us to countries. Both children and pensioners are about as pure examples of dependants as is possible irl. But unlike pensioners, children are actually a de-facto investment into the future; In fact arguably the most important one, since they directly control the ratio of productive vs dependant in the near future. People like to talk about how if we just had invested our retirement money better we wouldn't have problems, but this is again ignoring the fundamentals. For another toy examples, if people had no children but would invest their money sensibly, everyone would still be fucked once retirement hits, because whom to even give the money? It's worthless numbers on a screen at that point, with nobody actually producing anything. You can trivially extend this to low TFR and conclude that no matter how sensibly it would have been invested, it gets mostly eaten up by inflation, since what actually matters is the number of working people available who provide for the pensioners.
Yes there are alternative strategies to sustainable TFR, but they need to be done thoughtfully, and well. Investing into high-quality immigration is one; For example, one of my wife's former roommates is a thai nurse who was taught german already in thailand, in a school partially financed by germany, with a direct preparation for getting accredited as a nurse in germany. If they didn't put in the work at the school, they failed, and wouldn't go to germany. This is how you do it, and she correspondingly was a model immigrant. It's cheaper than having children yourself, but it's still a substantial amount of money you need to invest, and has some added extra risks. It's also inherently symbiotic/parasitary, as it requires other countries with spare TFR. This idea of just letting everybody in, and then just hoping it will go fine not only doesn't provide the necessary workers, it actually puts extra stress on the system as we have more dependants now, not less. The average MENA immigrant in germany is substantially net-negative.
We produced a giant surplus for a while, but we used it mostly for early retirements, going on lots of vacations, and an education system that is both unusually long and inefficient. Maybe we get bailed out by AIs in some fashion, but I don't like blindly hoping for a tech that isn't quite there yet. And the most likely trajectory I'm seeing there, though not apocalyptic, doesn't really seem particularly appealing.
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Also, it looks better for any resources that do not easily grow with more people, if you are measuring per capita.
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Yes, generally, this is the demographic dividend, and is generally acknowledged as part of they story of why China experienced such rapid growth (besides capitalism). Same thing with Korea, Japan, Ireland, etc.
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