It’s hard to imagine how this trend, combined with a shrinking and aging population, is going to maintain the pace of innovation.
That said, you correctly assures us that we probably are worrying too much. You also touch on a topic that may upend our demographic troubles: AI. AI is rising just as the population cliff is being reached, perhaps AI can fill the gap left in this new “empty planet.” If AI lives up to half the hype, we have no idea what is in store for 2100, one way or another.
[In response to JK Lund] Necessity is the mother of invention. In a world where record profits are completely plowed into financial assets through stock buybacks and dividends, there is little interest in investing in new things. One can achieve success through financial engineering without doing anything in the real business (see link).
One might argue that this action reflects an absence of things to invest in. If there were true, the rate of return on equity would have been falling in recent decades. It has been rising. Profits are no longer being invested because fewer projects meet the higher ROI expectations, leading to less demand for new stuff and so less new stuff getting developed. High profits expectations occur because financial engineering in today's environment is very profitable.
Haven't you noticed how so much new technology has been in the IT field that this type of technology has become synonymous with the word tech? Could it be the ease with which this sort of tech can be structured into a company that can go through an IPO in near future and produce big profits based more on market hype than on a sustained business. Contrast this with the great companies of the 20th century that remained privately held for many years before going public. They created profitable businesses that self-funded their own development and only went public when the founders' heirs wanted to diversify their inheritance.
Love the informal tone!! I may disagree but the arguments I marshal con- aren't any stronger than your pro ones!! In any case forecasting is a perilous endeavor for me. 🙂
Thank you for a good point around freaking out too much on population.
I have trouble with some aspects across the article. Freedom for women looks really overstated. Many women “chose” to work instead of having children, but they have no real choice economically, sometimes even married. In Japan where I have lived most of my life, younger women have no children because marriage is socially necessary, and they don’t want to pair with too frequently patriarchal or childish men. Yet they’d like to have children.
Another aspect is the underlying energy. You refer rightly to resources as limiting factor for bacteria, and then conclude we are not like that. I can’t help concluding we are exactly like that. One interesting way forward would be to plot population and energy production worldwide over time (say wood, coal and oil). My hunch is that population decline coincides with energy production peaks like in 2008 (conventional oil) and 2018 (other oils). Less energy, less we can do.
Last comment is to link the two: Women and energy. Recent work (“Feminicene” in French only still) presents evidence that feminism and the improvement of the women condition in our societies correlate really well with abundant energy, plus a singular condition based on energy: Drop in child mortality. Such thesis looks more than a coincidence, especially when we see that now Russia (!) has lower child mortality rate than the US.
Great article - and I agree with pretty much everything you've written.
I think the main problem with demographics right now is the mismatch between increasing longevity and a static fertility window. It means that we spend our prime reproductive age earlier along in the social process - are are often still casually dating around way after we should start having children.
We need more investment in reproductive technology - IVF and co were a good start - but we should be aiming for other ways to extend fertility as well. If we don't then the fertility/life expectancy mismatch will leave significant scars on our generation as we age. Humans will be fine as a whole - but anyone who's suffered with infertility will tell you that its no picnic.
Also assuming we ever do get off planet - we'll need a population boom to spread skywards - otherwise why bother - there's more than enough space on earth.
I definitely agree we need more investment in reproductive technology-maximizing personal reproductive freedom also means helping free people from the unjust constraints of biology! I think ectogenesis could help a lot of people and should get much more R&D funding. You might like this article from Works in Progress on the subject.
I don't agree at all as a member of NPG. Resources are short, pollution is up, global warming is continuing. The earth can perhaps handle no more than 4-5 billion people, particularly if they all live like Americans or Europeans as they all wish to do. Bruce "Degrowth" Stewart.
60-70 years ago American economic policy was designed to make America a place when young couples could financially manage to grow a family. Policy changed in the 1960’s and 1970’s and especially in the 1980’s to make the American economy no longer conducive to family formation and we have progressively had less of it.
I have no doubt that even if the economy of the past were restored couples would have the number of children they had then. I expect fertility would remain below replacement, but not grossly so. More importantly, in such an economy there would be an abundance rather than the zero-sum mentality pervading the working and middle classes. Under such an economy, wages for black men relative white men rose from 48% to 68% with little change since 1980. Under such an economy, the economy would expand to provide jobs for immigrants and better ones for citizens. This is the war America continues to be a leading nation unto the end of the century. But alas. doing this is contrary to the interests of the economic elite and so cannot happen unless something changes.
Great article Sam, though I am not sure that I agree. We are already seeing declining dynamism in innovation; progress is increasingly incremental, as I argued here: https://www.lianeon.org/p/the-innovation-red-queens-race
It’s hard to imagine how this trend, combined with a shrinking and aging population, is going to maintain the pace of innovation.
That said, you correctly assures us that we probably are worrying too much. You also touch on a topic that may upend our demographic troubles: AI. AI is rising just as the population cliff is being reached, perhaps AI can fill the gap left in this new “empty planet.” If AI lives up to half the hype, we have no idea what is in store for 2100, one way or another.
[In response to JK Lund] Necessity is the mother of invention. In a world where record profits are completely plowed into financial assets through stock buybacks and dividends, there is little interest in investing in new things. One can achieve success through financial engineering without doing anything in the real business (see link).
One might argue that this action reflects an absence of things to invest in. If there were true, the rate of return on equity would have been falling in recent decades. It has been rising. Profits are no longer being invested because fewer projects meet the higher ROI expectations, leading to less demand for new stuff and so less new stuff getting developed. High profits expectations occur because financial engineering in today's environment is very profitable.
Haven't you noticed how so much new technology has been in the IT field that this type of technology has become synonymous with the word tech? Could it be the ease with which this sort of tech can be structured into a company that can go through an IPO in near future and produce big profits based more on market hype than on a sustained business. Contrast this with the great companies of the 20th century that remained privately held for many years before going public. They created profitable businesses that self-funded their own development and only went public when the founders' heirs wanted to diversify their inheritance.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/effects-of-business-cultural-evolution
Love the informal tone!! I may disagree but the arguments I marshal con- aren't any stronger than your pro ones!! In any case forecasting is a perilous endeavor for me. 🙂
Thanks for your kind words!
Thank you for a good point around freaking out too much on population.
I have trouble with some aspects across the article. Freedom for women looks really overstated. Many women “chose” to work instead of having children, but they have no real choice economically, sometimes even married. In Japan where I have lived most of my life, younger women have no children because marriage is socially necessary, and they don’t want to pair with too frequently patriarchal or childish men. Yet they’d like to have children.
Another aspect is the underlying energy. You refer rightly to resources as limiting factor for bacteria, and then conclude we are not like that. I can’t help concluding we are exactly like that. One interesting way forward would be to plot population and energy production worldwide over time (say wood, coal and oil). My hunch is that population decline coincides with energy production peaks like in 2008 (conventional oil) and 2018 (other oils). Less energy, less we can do.
Last comment is to link the two: Women and energy. Recent work (“Feminicene” in French only still) presents evidence that feminism and the improvement of the women condition in our societies correlate really well with abundant energy, plus a singular condition based on energy: Drop in child mortality. Such thesis looks more than a coincidence, especially when we see that now Russia (!) has lower child mortality rate than the US.
Thank you again for your rounded article.
Great article - and I agree with pretty much everything you've written.
I think the main problem with demographics right now is the mismatch between increasing longevity and a static fertility window. It means that we spend our prime reproductive age earlier along in the social process - are are often still casually dating around way after we should start having children.
We need more investment in reproductive technology - IVF and co were a good start - but we should be aiming for other ways to extend fertility as well. If we don't then the fertility/life expectancy mismatch will leave significant scars on our generation as we age. Humans will be fine as a whole - but anyone who's suffered with infertility will tell you that its no picnic.
Also assuming we ever do get off planet - we'll need a population boom to spread skywards - otherwise why bother - there's more than enough space on earth.
I definitely agree we need more investment in reproductive technology-maximizing personal reproductive freedom also means helping free people from the unjust constraints of biology! I think ectogenesis could help a lot of people and should get much more R&D funding. You might like this article from Works in Progress on the subject.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/womb-for-improvement/
I don't agree at all as a member of NPG. Resources are short, pollution is up, global warming is continuing. The earth can perhaps handle no more than 4-5 billion people, particularly if they all live like Americans or Europeans as they all wish to do. Bruce "Degrowth" Stewart.
60-70 years ago American economic policy was designed to make America a place when young couples could financially manage to grow a family. Policy changed in the 1960’s and 1970’s and especially in the 1980’s to make the American economy no longer conducive to family formation and we have progressively had less of it.
I have no doubt that even if the economy of the past were restored couples would have the number of children they had then. I expect fertility would remain below replacement, but not grossly so. More importantly, in such an economy there would be an abundance rather than the zero-sum mentality pervading the working and middle classes. Under such an economy, wages for black men relative white men rose from 48% to 68% with little change since 1980. Under such an economy, the economy would expand to provide jobs for immigrants and better ones for citizens. This is the war America continues to be a leading nation unto the end of the century. But alas. doing this is contrary to the interests of the economic elite and so cannot happen unless something changes.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/two-visions-of-america-bedford-falls