Die Fruchtbarkeitskrise – die nächste Herausforderung des Kapitalismus

[Niall Ferguson](https://www.hoover.org/profiles/niall-ferguson) joins the Chicago Booth Review’s *Capitalisn’t* podcast to discuss the future implications of contemporary demographic challenges facing advanced economies. Ferguson and the show’s hosts discuss how factors like climate change, immigration, reproductive rights, artificial intelligence, and the trade-offs women face between career and motherhood are influencing decisions to have children. The group also considers the implications of falling birth rates not just for the market economy but also for geopolitics and intergenerational conflict. Ferguson argues, “The world of shrinking population will be a world with precisely the opposite of the dynamism that characterized the period of rapid human population growth. It’s a rather desolate prospect.”

How do you view the relationship between present trends in birth rates and the future dynamism of capitalist or market-oriented societies?

I find his two main points both pretty facile.

Claim 1: it’s too late for a dwindling population to halt any issues we face because of climate change. It’s certainly true that we face major problems with climate change even if the population dropped to 10% tomorrow. Here are a couple points he ignores: 1. The degree of climate change we settle on still matters. This is a problem that is not going to be solved in a decade or even a hundred years. The climate will keep changing, and people will keep using resources. So the number of people absolutely has consequences well into the future. 2. We are doing other kinds of environmental damage besides releasing CO2, and the number of people doing that damage matters.

Claim 2: We need a higher population in case AI tries to take over. This is so ridiculous on its face. If a truly world-ending general AI somehow gains consciousness, it is not going to be fought by armies of humans. It will be the kind of battle humans will not even understand how to fight. The number of humans alive will not matter at all. (I don’t think AI will ever get to that point, but I’m entertaining that possibility.)

I’m still listening to this, but I just find it so frustrating how our “experts”, especially economists, are so unwilling to exercise their imaginations about different possible futures. Recent human history is so anomalous in lots of ways. And the future can be anomalous compared to what we’ve been doing lately.

Fertility is a problem that solves itself when you make choices that help average people instead of corporations. Besides, the world is overpopulated already, lower fertility is better.

How is it that I am smarter than some dude writing for chicagobooth.edu?

European and north American countries are aging. Immigration was meant to remedy the situation since immigrants tend to be younger (especially international students) and will have children.

But now there’s backlash and you have parties being elected on the promise of slashing immigration and deporting existing immigrant populations.

Younger citizens want higher wages, but the governments who get elected to remove immigrants tend to also oppose collective bargaining and are fans of cutting social programs to „balance the budget“

So I’m not really sure what they expect to happen here. If you kick out the younger people who are buying things and working because the population has decided they aren’t welcome in the country, and the existing workers aren’t offered higher wages or more funding in the social programs that would make having children economically feasible I don’t get what the play here is.

Is the expectation that the average adult while struggling to make ends meet as things go up in price and wage gains get eaten by inflation would choose to raise a child in poverty because…?

Here’s the solution:

– AI
– advanced humanoid robotics + AI
– UBI
– Cure aging

Done!