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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I cannot express just how confident I am that the price of a square foot of housing in the United States is not an important driver of low fertility rates

You are absolutely wrong. Population density and it's associated costs are maybe the biggest difference in variation between tfr of developed countries.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693032/

This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space. On the other end of the spectrum, extremely densely populated over urbanized countries with high cost per square foot of property in east asia, such as Korea, China, and Japan, are on the opposite end of the spectrum.

You can easily see this within the US as well. Places like NYC have abnormally low birth rates, especially among native populations.

This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space.

Russia and France have the same sub-replacement TFR as the Maldives and Qatar, two countries famous for having no free space at all. Next to the latter two are equally cramped Djibouti and the Seychelles, both with above-average TFR.

It makes sense that Djibouti would have a high fertility.

...what do you mean, specifically?

I just checked, and Djibouti's TFR is 2.522, according to this. This is actually interesting when one compares it to Somalia (note: Djibouti's population is majority Somali and overwhelmingly Muslim) with a TFR of 5.661, ie. over the double the rate in Djibouti. Just the effect of Djibouti's (obviously) greater urbanization?

I was making a childish pun about the pronunciation of the name Djibouti.

Russia and France modernized post WW2. Qatar is currently modernizing and therefore is only just now dropping below replacement. It's where France was in the 50+ years ago in the cycle. Obviously modernization is the main trend here that dominates all other, but Qatar doesn't seem to be an outlier at all. UAE is already sub 1.5. Saudi Arabia seems to be behind on the curve, but its still quickly trending below 2.1. It may be the case that in 20 years Qatar's TFR will still be 1.80, but it doesn't seem that way.

France modernized post WW2.

Wait.... Really? By what measurements? I always imagined they were as modern as the US or England prior to WWII and I'm surprised to hear that they weren't.

Basically all industrialized countries went through the modernization that led to declining birth rates post WW2, but France definitely lagged behind Germany and the UK economically before the 2nd world war.

This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space. On the other end of the spectrum, extremely densely populated over urbanized countries with high cost per square foot of property in east asia, such as Korea, China, and Japan, are on the opposite end of the spectrum.

I think this can be explained by demographics, like immigration and high Muslim population in France. Religiosity seems to be correlated with birth rates. Look at the Mormons for example.

Religiosity doesn't seem to have much correlation in general. There are exceptions (mormons, like you said, but even they are trending down fast) and the most religious countries in the world, the Arab peninsula states, have low birth rates that are trending down fast.

This is a complete tangent. But I want some more opinions on this matter. I understand the general two themes of

  1. lower birth rate = Less young people to take care of old people

  2. less young people = less productive working people

I these negative consequences of a lower birthrate; however, resources in any country (or planet) are necessarily finite. So even if there is space now for there to be a higher birthrate in most of these countries, at some point there won't be. At some point it will be NECESSARY to have a lower birth rate (Alternatively a higher death rate, but i don't like that alternative) to account for the resource constraints. And the first issue issue is also a transitory one in many respects as long as the birth rate is at or above replacement, the number of people in the space will eventually stabalise to a consistent level and there will once again be enough young people to support the old. And both could potentially become obsolete someday with the increase in mechanical automation of labor.

TL;DR Can someone give me an argument against the fact that at some point we will eventually need a lower birth rate in at least some parts of the world at a given time.

Earth is nowhere near its carrying capacity, and the human population is more realistically limited by the resources of the solar system on any time scale where the Earth's carrying capacity is an issue. If Human population was about to trend to 40 billion, then Malthusian carrying capacity might become an issue. 9 billion? Not even close.

The biggest issue right now is that modern welfare systems are basically ponzi schemes. The eventual solution will be obvious--drastically cut spending, but that's difficult to achieve in democracies where the people paying are outnumbered by the people being paid.

This just seems like a kind of pointless worry as we don't actually have a high enough birthrate to replace ourselves. It's not at some point we're going to need to dip below positive so that we don't run out of space, it's we crossed that point decades ago and are so far on the other side that things are going to get weird. Unless you're talking on a global context, at which point housing policy in specific countries is not really an important factor.

If we accept that NIMBY policies lead to lower density, then sure. I don't think that's the case. Very few places have an incentive to build up and not out, but regulations increases costs for both.

Or conversely, low costs per area will allow bigger houses to be cheaper.

YIMBYs don't want bigger houses; they want more houses in the same space.

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